New section in which reviews of outstanding works of Mediterranean literature and authors from countries of the Mediterranean basin are periodically published. This second instalment is dedicated to the work of Ronit Matalon, And the bride shut the door, recently translated into Spanish.
Technical sheet:
And the bride closed the door
Ronit Matalon
Translated by Ana María Bejarano
Minúscula publishing, 2020
144 pages
A work by the Israeli writer Ronit Matalon (1959-2017), author of nine novels and winner of numerous literary prizes, has finally appeared translated into Spanish. And the Bride Closed the Door (Editorial Minúscula, 2020) is Matalon's final work and reaches our hands once again thanks to the work of an independent publisher, in a magnificent translation from the Hebrew by Ana María Bejarano.
The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Egypt, Ronit Matalon worked as a literature lecturer at the University of Haifa, also working as a reporter for the newspaper Haaretz, for which she covered Gaza and the West Bank between 1987 and 1993. From the beginning, her works enjoyed public and critical acclaim, turning some of them into best sellers and receiving prestigious awards, such as the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Literary Works and the Bernstein Prize. From the late 1990s to the present day, her novels have likewise appeared translated into other languages such as German, Dutch, English, French, Italian and Turkish, among others.
Awarded the 2017 Brenner Prize, conferred by the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel and the Haft Family Foundation, And the Bride Closed the Door features as its protagonist in absentia a bride who shuts herself away in her parents' bedroom hours before her wedding celebration. The bride's seclusion brings together under one roof the various characters who weave the profusion of underlying themes in this novel. Relationships are analysed through the eyes of Mati, the bewildered prospective husband whose perspective on love undergoes upheavals matching the drama of the situation. The bride's cousin, Ilan, is a green-eyed Narcissus who enjoys wearing his cousin's clothes and considers the Israeli army incompatible with him. The bride's sister, Nathalie, disappeared at the age of 11 under strange circumstances, leading some family members to suspect Palestinian terrorism. The issue of the Palestinian conflict also appears in the work through Adnan, a worker for the Palestinian Authority electricity company, a good friend of an acquaintance of the family whom they call upon so that his crane can reach the window of the room where the bride is locked inside.
The claustrophobic gathering of the future newlyweds' families, who are forced to live together in the small living room of the flat where the bride is secluded, represents a clash between the two great traditions vying to defend their place in the definition of Jewish national identity and their respective levels of power: the Ashkenazi, descendants of Central and Eastern European Jews, and the Mizrahi, that of Jews originally from the Middle East and North Africa.
And, in the background, those 500 wedding guests waiting in a function room, along with the orchestra and the banquet, adding pressure to the pot where all these elements are stewing. Throughout the novel, Ronit Matalon makes use of a sly and biting sense of humour and a thoroughly accurate talent for character description, which at times leads to hilarious situations – as happens with the hiring of the “Runaway Brides” emergency service, staffed by a team of psychiatrists to deal with such cases. This kind of humour also connects with a tradition represented in contemporary Israeli literature in novels such as Amos Oz's Black Box, David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar, or in the work of authors such as Etgar Keret, but also in that of the Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, demonstrating that there is a humour born of the land which seems to know nothing of passports.
And the bride closed the door pays tribute to the poet, playwright, literary critic and multilingual translator, Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), whose face, along with one of her poems, appears on the 100 shekel banknotes in Israel. And while it is true that this short novel is open to different interpretations, its ultimate meaning is probably to be found in that tribute.
By Natalia Arce
Portuguese