Don't Tell Your Brother, by Meir Shalev: Be Beautiful and Shut Up!

Here are Itamar and Boaz, two brothers in their sixties. The first has lived in the United States, in Virginia, for thirty-five years, where he is the manager of a sports hall. The second, who is an engineer, lives in Israel with his wife Maya and their children. Every year, Itamar and Boaz meet in Tel Aviv for a “fraternal night” in a hotel, where they talk about their lives, their memories, while drinking a certain quantity of fig brandy.

We are in 2010. And this time, Itamar, for a reason that will be revealed to us later, decides to tell his brother the story he had, twenty years earlier, with a stranger he met in a bar. You should know, useful clarification, that the writer Meir Shalev chose to feature a character with a more than advantageous physique, a heartthrob physique as our grandmothers used to say, a “BG” as girls today say 'today. Itamar was their mother's favorite, who compared him to Apollo, Cary Grant and Clark Gable! Boaz lived in…