A Pigeon and a Boy: Almost Finished!

            I have had fun with my outside reading for my group, the Israeli group, but have also been slightly frustrated.  I am reading the book A Pigeon and a Boy, but am now disappointed in it, even though I am near the end.  The book is not what I had expected; it is a little too graphic for my taste, and the story is quite odd. 

                  A Pigeon and a Boy was written by Meir Shalev, and fluctuates between two stories.  The first story is written in the first person about a character named Yair Mendelsohn and is a narrative of his fairly normal, daily life.  The story begins when Yair is a child, and continues until he is a grown man who has a job as a tour guide and who struggles with a failing marriage.  The second story is about two characters called “the Baby” and “the Girl,” two child pigeon raisers who meet and fall in love.  The chapters alter back and forth between the two stories, but the reader does not see the significance of the second story, and how it intertwines with the first story, until near the end of the novel. 

Yair continually addresses his mother as the reader of his tale, though his mother has already passed away.  Two important facts that Yair restates often are the fact that he looks very different than the rest of his family and the fact that his mother did not always have a happy marriage with her husband.  This unhappy marriage seems to affect Yair later in life when he suffers from an unhappy marriage as well. 

I did not think that the novel was teaching me much about life in Israel, but maybe that is because life there is not drastically different from life in America, or any other Westernized country!  What the book has given me is much information on pigeon raising!  Hmm, not quite what I expected!!!