Edna Mazya. Love Burns.

Cohen, Leslie

Edna Mazya. Love Burns. Dalya Bilu, tr. New York. Europa. 2006. 220 pages. $14.95. ISBN 1-933372-08-7

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY are deftly interwoven in Love Burns. In the opening pages of this novel, the neurotic protagonist, Ilan, describes himself as "an aging semi-intellectual, with a tendency to morbid introspection," and the reader finds this an all-too-accurate portrait. Although he is a professor of astrophysics at Israel's prestigious Technion, the forty-eight-year-old Ilan has the emotional maturity of a teenage boy. So preoccupied is he with his twenty-five-year-old wife and her extramarital affair, that he is unable to concentrate on anything else. Just when the reader has lost all patience for his nonstop, whining interior monologue, however, a dramatic event causes Ilan to transform himself from a self-obsessed, flat character into a multifaceted individual. It is supremely ironic that, by killing his wife's lover in a tragicomic accident, Ilan becomes a mensch. His focus shifts from self-obsession to an intense examination of every person he encounters, and we discover in him both a scientist who is awed by the mysterious inner workings of the universe and a human being who authentically questions the meaning of a human life. While the pre-manslaughter Ilan was blinded by his despair over his wife's infidelity, the post-manslaughter Ilan takes a genuine interest in the people around him and empathizes with their agonies and loneliness.

Anton, Ilan's childhood friend, with whom he plays chess but has given up conversation, is a savvy police detective, thus much of the novel is spent on the game of cat-and-mouse they play. To further lighten the serious atmosphere, the author has generously sprinkled the novel with farcical, improbable incidents. The comic is never far from the tragic in Edna Mazya's work.

Ilan's mother is, of course, his best friend and sole confidante. Although she has little patience for his adolescent antics, she does protect and defend him in his darkest hour. And she demonstrates the depth of her love for him by her final self-sacrifice.

In short, Mazya seems to be saying that life is a carnival of tragedy and comedy and that nobody--neither the most erudite professional nor the lowliest street dweller--is exempt from its vicissitudes.

Leslie Cohen

Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Israel