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David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist of his generation, showed himself in his internationally acclaimed novel, See Under: LOVE, to be a consummate artist of the inner life of the child. Now, in his most moving and accessible novel yet, he gives us the story of the greatest and most universal tragedy, the loss of that childhood world. At twelve, Aron Kleinfeld is the ringleader among the boys in his Jerusalem neighborhood, their inspiration in dreaming up games and adventures. But as his friends begin to mature, Aron remains imprisoned for three long years in the body of a child. While Israel inches toward the Six-Day War, and while the voices of his friends change and become strange to him, Aron lives in his child body as though in a nightmare. Like a spy in enemy territory, he learns to decipher the internal codes of sexuality and desire, to understand the unyielding bureaucracy of the human body. Hurled between childhood and adulthood, between the pure and the profane, he is like a volcano of emotions and impulses. But, like his hero Houdini, Aron still struggles to escape from the trap of growing up. The Book of Intimate Grammar is about the alchemy of childhood, which transforms loneliness and fear into creation, and about the struggle to emerge as an artist. Funny, painful and passionate, it is a work of enormous intensity and beauty.

"This stunning new novel by the Israeli writer David Grossman belongs in the pantheon of great books that feature a definitively post-Freudian child as the protagonist....Despite its narrow domestic focus, 'The Book of Intimate Grammar' is rich and dense, full of startling perceptions and dark, ironic wit. It is a complex book containing multiple layers of meaning. It can be read, at once, as a tale of magic realism, a parable about the damage left in the wake of the Holocaust, a psychological portrait of a child's descent into madness and, finally, as a comical but searing indictment of the Jewish family."

Lore Dickstein, New York Times Book Review, 11/13/94

"Unlike our own pioneers and practitioners of the non-fiction novel, Grossman is never a showy presence either in his reportage or his fiction. But from the impression his prose has made on Israel's leading writer--A.B. Yehoshua has been teaching a course on The Book--one may gather that Grossman is as stimulating artistically as he is brave in reporting the true relation between the occupied and the occupier."

Alfred Kazin, New York Review of Books

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