It is hard to articulate precisely this fascination with a slim work by a leading writer. Slim not simply in length, though Amos Oz’s latest novel weighs in at just 155 pages of moderately large type. Slim also because Rhyming Life and Death comes without its author’s investing in grand civilisation points and symbolism.

The last book by Oz, Israel’s leading living writer who is periodically mentioned as a frontrunner for the Nobel prize, was A Tale of Love and Darkness, a memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the forties and fifties. It combined the story of an unusual childhood, one in which Oz’s will to be a writer was forged, with the story of the founding of the Israeli state. It was an introduction to the social roots of a Socialist Zionism that dominated the early leaders, but which is now a fading memory even though Oz continues to canvas in elections for the Meretz, a party on the left of a right-weighted Israeli spectrum that is good in that country’s system of proportional representation for two-three seats in the Knesset.

Rhyming Love and Death is also limited in expanse compared with much of Oz’s fiction. In it the interior lives of the characters do not necessarily reflect the political landscape of the country, as they do in his major novels like My Michael. A celebrity writer known to us only as the Author is to give a reading at a Tel Aviv cultural centre, and we track him for a few hours, from the moment he enters a café to kill time before the late-evening reading right through to his hours-long walkabout in the neighbourhood after it.

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