The Retrospective

by Yehoshua, A. B.; Schoffman, Stuart

• ISBN13: 9780547496962
• ISBN10: 0547496966
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-03-05
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

From the internationally acclaimed author of Mr. Maniand A Woman in Jerusalem, a thrilling novel that explores the relationship between life and art through the eyes of a film director, his screenwriter, and their muse. An aging film director named Yair Moses has been invited to the Spanish pilgrim city of Santiago de Compostela for a retrospective of his early work. As he and Ruth, his leading actress and longtime muse, settle into their hotel, Moses notices the painting over his bed, Caritas Romana, depicting a classical legend of a starving old prisoner man nursing at the breast of his daughter. For the first time in decades, he recalls the infamous scene from one of his early films which led to his estrangement from his difficult but brilliant screenwriter, Trigano, Ruth's former lover. Throughout the retrospective, Moses is unsettled, straddling the past and the present, and upon his return to Israel, he decides to travel to the south to find the elusive Trigano and propose a new collaboration. But the screenwriter demands a price for such a reconciliation, one that will have strange and lasting consequences. Searching, intellectual, and original, The Retrospectiveis a probing meditation on mortality, the limits of memory, and the struggle of artistic creation by one of the world's most esteemed writers