Yoram Kaniuk is one of the most lucid and imaginative—and least pedestrian—of Israeli novelists writing today. His prose is fluid, irridescent and charged with a soaring power. His writing has the quality of tale and fable. The element of the fantastic courts reality and enhances it.

The magic which fills his fiction is manifested in this novel, as in his earlier book, Rockinghorse. It is the magic of the early Tel Aviv and its fading beauty…. In both these books there is a fabric of legend and reality, memory and fantasy woven around the city built on golden dunes. Today very little is left of the former grandeur (real or imitated). Like everyone else who has had a taste of those days, Kaniuk bemoans the destruction….

In the marvelous image of Aunt Shlomzion Kaniuk presents a timeless figure in her provenance of power, beauty, obsession and...