It is a depressing vision of the human condition that Yehoshua projects in [Three Days and a Child]. In each of its five stories attention is focused on a protagonist trapped within the prison of some inner despair and alienation that constantly threatens to break out—and sometimes does—into some kind of disaster. Everywhere there hovers the smell of danger, the nuance of menace….

Yehoshua's many talents come through powerfully…. His observation of the details of Israeli life—its cities, its implacable summers, its landscape—are done with deftness and vivid simplicity. (p. 27)

In the existential despair, the pessimism, the sense of dislocation and alienation that pervade his work, Yehoshua establishes a bridge between modern Israeli writing and a dominant stream of some of the best Western literature of our age—and he does this without abandoning, except for the single exception of "Flood Tide," the everyday...