"The Blue Mountain"

Each of the four readers of Meir Shalev's "The Blue Mountain" who reviewed it on www.amazon.com gave it four (the maximum) stars. It is the story of a settlement in Israel's Jezreel valley, clearly not a kibbutz, perhaps a moshav, perhaps something unique in its organization. Started by four friends, three male members of the second aliyah and one woman, who marries one of the three (she marries the winner of the lottery they held for her). Others of their generations come and leave, more marriages occur, children and even grandchildren are born and die. The characters are both humorous and sad, one of a kind and universal. There is a little more fantasy in their makeup than reality.

I thought the book started very well and for the first hundred pages, I was certain that the remaining two hundred fifty would be very enjoyable. But it was (for me) to be. (For me) the book went nowhere. And, by the way it was organized (or perhaps better because it seemed to lack any form of organization--it certainly had only a semblance of chronology), it was impossible for it to go anywhere.

So, at page 150, I gave up. But not before I read the last chapter to see what happened. It was as I feared. If anything more happened, I did not care. The last chapter chapter 51, I read after chapter 27. I did not miss a beat. And at the end of the book, chronologically speaking, we were back in an earlier chapter, as if it was the present not the past, and as if the future (which I had read about as if it were the past) had not yet occurred.

Perhaps this is a four star book. But to my surprise, I didn't think so.