As short fiction goes, this was mighty fine, up to a point. Oz's eye for the human foible and his ability to draw the reader right into the middle of the lives of his characters is awesome. I started each of these stories of ordinary people in the century-old pioneer village of Tel Ilan eager to meet the mayor, the librarian, the doctor...and I feel I know them all so well now. And yet each story left me unsettled and bewildered...what, in the name of G-d is he trying to tell us, after all? Wives wander off without explanation...go to visit a sister and just never come back, or leave a note "Don't worry about me", and disappear. A woman waits for the arrival of a nephew she's been told to expect...he doesn't come, and finally she just eats the warmed up dinner she had prepared and goes off to bed, after mithering for hours about what she should do. A man feels drawn to a room where a young boy took his own life years before...why? Another young man seems to be sliding down a path to that ultimate despair...but then again, is he just experiencing normal teenaged angst and hormonal upheaval? Always an ending that resolves nothing, explains nothing, suggests nothing. Of course, I often feel that way about short fiction. It's why I read so little of it. I don't think I understand the point of so much of it, even when it's as marvelously written as these examples are. ( )

Raccolta di racconti sullo sfondo di un paesino israeliano, abitato da svariati personaggi di cui si racconta un avvenimento della loro storia. Un po' inferiore ai precedenti romanzi di Oz (romanzi, appunto), comunque scritto molto bene. Solo un dubbio: l'ultimo racconto non c'entra nulla con tutto il resto, a partire dallo stile. Perchè inserirlo? ( )

> Revue des Deux Mondes, (MARS 2010), pp. 187-188 : (PDF)
> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Oz-Scenes-de-vie-villageoise/159378
> BAnQ (Le devoir, 27 févr. 2010) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2928830
> BAnQ (Le devoir, 23 janv. 2010) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2928741

Need to see what others rated it so highly for and what I missed. To me this was a disjointed collection of narratives taking place in a bucolic Israeli village that is on the cusp of change and modernization/monetization. As a result, bizarre things are happening (a stranger comes to town and crawls into bed with an old lady, the mayor's wife disappears, there are sounds of digging from underneath the teacher's house, but no evidence of it. None of it is ever resolved or explained. There are tensions between old and new, and considerable consternation about an Arab student living/working on the teacher's farm (and ironing her underwear) and I get that all of this is probably an undercurrent of fear of change and latent nationalism, and is billed as "a memorable novel in stories" with "unsettling glimpses of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life" but I just couldn't grasp it as a whole. ( )

Dove è sparita la moglie di Benni Avni dopo avergli lasciato un biglietto privo di indizi, raccomandandosi solo di non preoccuparsi per lei? Un grande racconto da un grande Amos Oz. Tratto da Scene dalla vita di un villaggio, pubblicato da Feltrinelli. Numero di caratteri: 32.993. Ti piace questo ebook? Leggi le altre esclusive digitali di Feltrinelli Editore » http://bit.ly/ebookZoom