A Perfect Peace

{{Short description|1982 novel by Israeli author Amos Oz}}

{{Infobox book

| name = A Perfect Peace

| title_orig = מנוחה נכונה

| translator = Hillel Halkin

| image = A Perfect Peace cover.jpg

| image_size = 180px

| caption = First edition (Hebrew)

| author = Amos Oz

| country = Israel

| language = Hebrew

| genre = Literary fiction

| publisher = Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

| pub_date = 1982

| english_pub_date = 1985

| media_type = Print (hardcover)

| pages = 374

| isbn = 0-15-171696-X

| oclc =

}}

A Perfect Peace ({{langx|he| מנוחה נכונה}}) is a 1982 novel by Israeli author Amos Oz that was originally published in Hebrew by Am Oved. It was translated by Hillel Halkin and published in the United States by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1985.

Plot

Set in Israel during the eighteen months leading up to the Six-Day War, the novel portrays life on a fictional kibbutz, Granot, where the founding generation and their children struggle to come to terms with each other and the ideological tensions within Israeli society. Oz documents the gap between the socialist dream of the founders and the strained realities of Israeli life, but it is also, according to the author, a mystical tale about "the secret merger between six or seven very different human beings who become a family in the deepest sense of the term."Quoted in Grace Schulman (June 2, 1985), [https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-perfectpeace.html "Summer Reading: Fiction That is Worlds Apart"], The New York Times (accessed March 27, 2013).

Critical reception

A Perfect Peace was hailed by Publishers Weekly as "magnificent" upon its release and described by The Washington Post Book World as Oz's "strangest, riskiest, and richest novel". It won the Bernstein Prize in 1983.{{cite web |url=http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/heksherim/Archives/Pages/Amos-Oz-Prizes.aspx|title=Amos Oz - Prizes, Awards, and Honors|publisher=Ben-Gurion University of the Negev|date=|website=|access-date=21 February 2016}}

References

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Further reading

  • Balaban, Avraham. Between God and Beast: An Examination of Amos Oz's Prose (Penn State University Press, 1993), pp. 110–30, 211–29.
  • Mazor, Yair. Somber Lust: The Art of Amos Oz, trans. Marganit Weinberger-Rotman (State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 139–57.

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Category:1985 novels

Category:20th-century Israeli novels

Category:Books about the kibbutz

Category:Novels by Amos Oz

Category:Novels set in Israel

Category:Jewish novels

Category:Am Oved books