When I first tried to read this book, I was unable to do so, as the subject hit too close to home. My dear sister-in-law had suffered from dementia for several years and had just died. A year-plus later, I was able to finally pick The Tunnel back up and I’m glad I did.

Zvi Luria, a retired Israeli road engineer, is slowly losing part of his mind. One of the first things to go for him is first names. By the end of the book, he has trouble remembering his own first name. This story follows along with some road-building-related adventures, and includes an unusual meeting/relationship with an undocumented Palestinian family hiding in the Negev desert, whose story is pretty convoluted. But to me the heart of the story was Zvi’s relationship with his wife of many years, Dina, and how they cope with his decline. Since the author is even older than his protagonists, I felt the writing was realistic and very sympathetic.

Along with the sense of sadness due to Zvi’s increasing confusion, there are many funny moments, such as the scene at the opera. There was one instance that I found disturbing. Zvi gets the 4-digit ignition code for his car ignitions tattooed on his arm, in case he forgets it. For me, this recalled the tattooed numbers on the arms of those in Nazi concentration camps and I found it hard to believe that someone Jewish would even consider doing such a thing.

Without giving away too much, for me the ending, while symbolic, was weird (the name Zvi means deer in Hebrew).

The English translation from Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman felt very natural.

While I received the eARC from NetGalley, I wound up bouncing between the eARC and the published audiobook by HMH Adult Audio. The narrator, Rick Zieff, did an excellent job with the voices. Thank you to NetGalley and Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the opportunity to read an advance readers copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

I have read and enjoyed previous novels by Yehoshua. The cultural lore and the backdrop of Israel and its people are very interesting to me. However, I felt something was missing for me in this book. Perhaps it was all the focus on road engineering, a subject I have no interest in. I wanted to read the novel because of my interest in the protagonist's dementia but this aspect of the book takes second chair to the engineering part.

Zvi Luria is a retired road engineer who has been having trouble remembering first names., days of the week and his car ignition code. His family has noticed his forgetfulness and his wife takes him to a neurologist who finds that a small part of Zvi's brain is atrophied. This indicates dementia and cognitive decline but there is no telling how fast it will progress.

Zvi''s wife, a pediatrician, wants Zvi to stay active and engaged in life, a recommendation seconded by the neurologist. She helps him get a job as an unpaid assistant to a road engineer who is in charge of building a road in a crater in the Negev Desert. This is considered a covert military operation. What Zvi didn't bank on was the family of Palestinian nomads living in the crater under the protection of Shibbolet, an archeological anthropologist.

I was most interested in the family dynamics of this novel, especially the tender and loving relationship between Zvi and his wife. They are portrayed as a dedicated and caring couple, still passionate after decades of marriage.

Yehoshua writes well but, like all books, I have to be able to relate to the narrative and the topics. Unfortunately, I could not make myself care about the building of this road and the engineering aspects of turn-outs, curves or tunnels. The problem is likely with me more than with the book. Perhaps if I'd started it six months ago or six months from now, I'd have had a more positive impression.

I already knew what this book was going to be like, knowing how racist the author is and how much he hates Palestinians. I was not surprised when it turned out to be exactly like I thought it would be.

Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. Names are the first things to disappear. He’s a retired road engineer in Israel, a respected professional, but now his mind is starting to unravel. His neurologist suggests he should start working again and his wife arranges for him to work alongside a young engineer tasked with building a secret road for the Israeli military. But there is a mystery about this new project. It appears that there is an undocumented Palestinian family living near where the road must go and someone is standing up for them. I’m not sure I always followed what was happening with this family – a father and two children hiding out in the hills – and I found this whole sub-plot enigmatic and the family unconvincing. However, we see everything through Zvi’s eyes, and he, of course, doesn’t always get things right. I enjoyed the story of Zvi’s disintegration, but felt all through that I was missing something. Perhaps because he is too. The undercurrent of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is always there in the background, but the family on the hill didn’t seem to me to be the most effective way of exploring it. The projected tunnel through the hill is presumably a metaphor of some sort, but I remain perplexed. However, overall I enjoyed the book as narrative even if some of the allegorical and symbolic aspects of it escaped me.

it's a disturbing, engrossing, poignant and somehow heartwarming story.
Yehoshua is a great writer and storytelling and the plot flows keeping you hooked.
There's a lot of food for thought and there are great description of the MC dementia.
I loved the plot and the characters.
It's recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This is a great story about how we don't know everything about those closest to us. Zvi's mental decline and the effects it had on his family were written in a realistic manner. This is a great character driven story.

I had a hard time reading this book all the way through, as if the fog in the protagonist's brain had infected me and I often found it hard to remember where I had arrived and what had happened up to that point. Definitely not Yoshua's best book.

Ho fatto molta fatica a leggere questo libro fino in fondo, come se la nebbia nel cervello del protagonista mi avesse contagiato e spesso facevo fatica a ricordare dove ero arrivata e cosa fosse successo fino a quel punto. Decisamente non il miglior libro di Yoshua.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

Oddly both sad and hopeful, this is the story of Zvi Luria, a brilliant engineer who is beginning to feel the ravages of dementia. His wife Dina (wonderful woman btw) encourages him to take a job as the unpaid assistant to the son of one of his former associates. Asael Maimoni is building a road through a crater in the Negev but here's the rub- there's a Palestinian family living just where the road will go. Zvi's solution is a tunnel but its not that easy (or obvious). Things begin to spin out of control for him, as Dina is ill and he's not sure of himself. Yehoshua has a lot to offer here; there are philosophical and political nuances I'm sure I missed. It is still a very good read as a character study. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Slowly he is deteriorating and the verdict is clear: dementia. Zvi Luria, former road engineer, struggles with the diagnosis and the effects of the illness: increasingly, he is forgetting first names and once he could only be stopped at the last moment from picking up another boy than his grandchild from kindergarten. When he is invited to a farewell party of a former colleague, he visits his old office where he stumbles upon Asael Maimoni, the son of his last legal adviser, who is now occupying his post. Luria’s wife thinks it would be a good idea to get her husband’s brain filled with work again and thus he becomes Maimoni’s unpaid assistant in planning a tunnel in the Negev desert. When working on the road, he not only profits from his many years of experience that he can successfully use despite his slowly weakening memory, but he also learns a lot about his own country and the people he never tried to really get to know.

Yehoshua is one of the best known contemporary Israeli writers and professor of Hebrew Literature. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his work and his novels have been translated into many languages. Over and over again, Israel’s politics and the Jewish identity have been central in his works and this also plays an important part in his latest novel.

“The tunnel” addresses several discussion worthy topics. First of all, quite obviously, Luria’s dementia, what it does to him and how the old man and his surroundings cope with it. In an ageing society, this is something we all have come across and it surely isn’t an easy illness to get by since, on the one hand, physically, the people affected are totally healthy, but, on the other hand, the loss of memory gradually makes them lose independence and living with them becomes more challenging. If, like Luria, they are aware of the problems, this can especially hard if they had an intellectually demanding professional life and now experience themselves degraded to a child.

The second noteworthy aspect is the road-building which is quickly connected to the core Israeli question of how they treat non-Jewish residents and their culture. Not only an Arab family in hiding, due to a failed attempt to help them by a former commanding officer of the forces, opens Luria’s eyes on what is going on at the border clandestinely but with good intentions, but he also witnesses how officials treat the nomad tribe of Nabateans and their holy sites.

On a more personal level, the novel also touches questions of guilt and bad conscience as well as the possibility of changing your mind and behaviour even at an older age.

Wonderfully narrated with an interesting and loveable protagonist, it was a great joy to read this novel that I can highly recommend.

The Tunnel is a well-written work of literary fiction by an award winning Israeli author, A.B. Yehoshua. In it the main character, Zvi Luria, is a retired road engineer who is diagnosed with early onset dementia. His wife encourages a part-time project to keep his brain active: he will travel to the south to consult on a secret military road, but when he meets a nomadic Palestinian family in the direct path of the new road, plans change. I would not usually seek out a book such as this, but the way the author writes about the dementia and how it effects the character’s family is well crafted, and I found the dialogue to be well paced and believable, though at times it was confusing to identify who was speaking. While this is well written, I wasn’t thoroughly engaged with the subject matter, but that is personal preference and not based on the writer’s skill.
Rating: 3.5 stars

Advanced reader’s copy provided courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.