Moods

"Moods by Yoel Hoffmann--"Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius" (The Forward)--supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite. Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings--about his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee, with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness accentuated by a new dimension brought along with "that great big pill of Prozac." Literature's so pathetic. We peddle fabric with a sun painted on it and no one even looks up... Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book and, with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once called himself "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy" --