Book review: Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz

LAND and property seem sentient in Amos Oz's new story collection, which circles the interconnected inhabitants of the small Israeli village of Tel Ilan.

Spaces retain memories, and buildings hold the capacity to influence human actions. In Digging – probably the most directly allegorical of a set of stories that inevitably lend themselves to political interpretations – an elderly Jewish man, his middle-aged daughter and her young Arab lodger are all troubled by sounds of digging beneath their house, as if the land itself is too charged with trouble to allow them to sleep undisturbed under the same roof. In Lost, an estate agent visits the home of a deceased Jewish writer with a view to purchasing and demolishing it, but finds himself drawn ever further into a seemingly endless web of rooms within: there's no demolishing the past.

But while soil, bricks and mortar have strange powers of suggestion and persuasion, individual people seem deficient in constancy and will.

Their feelings shift – love co-existing with hatred, lust with violence, compassion with self-interest. In two of the most affecting stories in the collection, Waiting and Relations, family members simply don't show up when expected, and Oz – an expert interpreter of the extreme inner states of characters far too stoic and reticent to make a fuss – lets us guess whether he is chronicling a misunderstanding or a tragedy.

Two clear repeated motifs – land ownership, and long, fraught marriages marked by frustration and compromise – clearly speak to the struggles in Oz's homeland. But the sense of displacement that runs through Scenes From Village Life is also universal. Gently, and with a low, gritty wit that balances any potential excess of magic realist whimsy, Oz examines the frailty of human connections and the loneliness of loving. Ideas of belonging – by birthright on a piece of land, by blood within a family, by love and law within a marriage – are persistently exposed as unreliable constructs, as vulnerable as the old parts of the village that are being destroyed and modernised.

Like fairytale adventurers, Oz's characters start out with clear plans and beliefs, only to be thrown off by the vagaries of fate, or the fluctuations of their own drives and desires. These stories are written with a sparse clarity, and suffused with a sad empathy for the contradictions that confound us. They have both force and mystery, and they cast a quiet spell.