Past Perfect is a 1984 novel by

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

i novelist

Yaakov Shabtai Yaakov Shabtai ( he, יעקב שבתאי; March 8, 1934 – August 4, 1981) was an Israeli novelist, playwright, and translator. Biography Shabtai was born in 1934 in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine. In 1957, after completing military service, he ...

. The original

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

title, Sof Davar (Hebrew:סוף דבר) can be translated literally as ''The End Result'' or ''Epilogue''. Shabtai died in 1981, before completing a final draft. The novel was published posthumously, edited for publication by the literary scholar

Dan Miron Dan Miron ( he, דן מירון, born 1934) is an Israeli-born American literary critic and author. An expert on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Miron is a Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Leonar ...

and Shabtai's wife Edna. An

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

translation was published in 1987 by

Viking Press Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquire ...

.Life at the Last Moment
-

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

review of Past Perfect]

Plot

Meir, a 42-year-old architect from Tel Aviv, is suddenly stricken with the fear of dying. The plot deals with the changes in his life following this realization of his mortality, including an affair with his doctor, the death of his mother, and a trip to Europe. It ends with a birth following Meir's death, which could be seen as Meir's

reincarnation Reincarnation, also known as rebirth or transmigration, is the philosophical or religious concept that the non-physical essence of a living being begins a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death. Resurrection is a ...

as a baby or else as a return to his own birth, following

Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, Prose poetry, prose poet, cultural critic, Philology, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philo ...

's concept of the

eternal return Eternal return (german: Ewige Wiederkunft; also known as eternal recurrence) is a concept that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur in a self similar form an infinite number of times across in ...

Style

The novel serves as an indirect continuation of '' Past Continuous'' in terms of narrative, prose style, and themes. Unlike ''Past Continuous'', which was written as a single book-long paragraph (broken up in the English translation), in ''Past Perfect'' the narrative has been broken down into four parts, and divided further into paragraphs, albeit lengthy ones. The first part is written in the same

Stream of Consciousness In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver (physician), Daniel Ol ...

mode as the earlier novel, moving seamlessly between Meir's thought and external events. The later parts of the novel move away from this style, towards a more varied narration, until the very end, when Meir's death and rebirth are described in a lyrical, almost magical-realist style.

References

{{reflist 1984 novels 20th-century Israeli novels Unfinished novels Novels published posthumously Novels set in Israel