Review by Booklist Review
Israeli friends in their seventies, Avishay, Yehuda, Amos, Nili, and Zohara have known each other for decades through relationships, shared experiences, and career successes big and small. When Zohara walks into Avishay's apartment and finds him dead, she immediately calls the others to discuss what to do next. The timing is particularly cruel: Avishay was an esteemed economist widely considered to be a finalist for the Nobel Prize, which will be announced in a matter of days--and is never awarded posthumously. Yehuda, Amos, Nili, and Zohara embark on a farcical plan to keep Avishay's death a secret until the award is announced, though some of the friends have more explicit motives than others. Translated from the Hebrew, Yedlin's charmingly self-aware novel pays tribute to Waking Ned Devine and The Big Chill without lessening the genuine emotions shared amongst this unique group. Ruminating on the power of lifelong friendship--and a little luck--this warm and witty novel is sure to appeal to fans of Zoe Fishman's Inheriting Edith (2016) and Daniel H. Turtel's The Family Morfawitz (2023).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Israeli author Yedlin's deviously clever black comedy takes on death and the ties that linger. Avishay, a front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Economics, dies eight days before the announcement. Avishay's four closest friends know the committee won't award the prize to a dead person, and they vow to keep his death a secret until the big announcement. All they have to do is answer all his texts and emails in his voice and put off potential visitors. But there are unintended complications, including a cryptic message from a woman who, based on the friends' interpretation, might have gotten pregnant with Avishay, and a sudden need to move the decomposing corpse, which results in a macabre collision with an e-bike. As the day of the announcement draws near, friendships fray under the pressure of maintaining the deception, and all four must reckon with the idea that maybe Avishay, who was given to arrogance, really isn't worthy of their sacrifices. Yedlin puts her characters through the wringer with the nonstop confrontations, which are distressing to them and hilarious to the reader. At the same time, she uses the slapstick situation to ask probing questions about the nature of friendship and mortality. Readers will be amused by this literary variation on Weekend at Bernie's. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
When renowned Israeli economist Avishay dies at home alone of an apparent heart attack, his four best friends, like him almost 70, conspire to conceal his death for a week to keep him in the running for a Nobel Prize. Avishay is a strong contender for the honor but needs to be alive when the Nobel committee makes its decision. Yehuda, who has lived in Avishay's shadow despite becoming rich as a young man from his invention of a kitchen bag opener, proposes the scheme to keep him "alive." How would they want Avishay remembered, he poses: as "a nice, divorced professor of economics who had a few friends who liked him" or "a man who will be immortalized"? Not to mention a man whose foreword to Yehuda's yet unpublished book would ensure its success if it bore the Nobel imprint? Everyone has personal gains in mind. Zohara, a single, struggling ghostwriter who has been having an affair with the womanizing Avishay for 20 years, concocts a plan to grab a big share of the Nobel prize money by claiming she was his common-law wife. Keeping the death a secret proves as hairy as it is complicated, especially after an electric bicyclist runs over the dead body during an exasperating attempt to transfer it. As much as the book--the basis for a popular Israeli TV series--thrives on dark slapstick humor, it's no Weekend at Avishay's. Yedlin, a master at tone, grounds the antic comedy in reflections on aging, friendship, parenthood, life as "one big effort to compensate for feelings of inferiority," and "sadness, more sadness, respectable sadness, unsatisfying sadness, mature sadness." In the end, the absence of real mourning on anyone's part can be read as an embrace of life beyond death or a reflection of the shells in which many people live. A seriously funny take on death and dying. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
