“Don’t tell your brother”, by Meir Shalev: the useless beauty of men

The last novel by the most popular Israeli writer, Meir Shalev (1948-2023), Don't tell your brotherarouses in its reader a double nostalgia. A nostalgia which is at the heart of the story, first of all. Indeed, it features two brothers, Boaz, the engineer who remained in Israel, and Itamar, a sports coach based in the United States, who have both reached their sixties. In 2010, during their annual reunion in Tel Aviv, they discussed a scabrous episode that occurred twenty years earlier, before the era of cell phones and the Internet. Nostalgia, then, for a time before the massacres of October 7, 2023, when the intimate and its complexities prevailed over war, just as gender conflicts still prevailed over the sound of boots.

The author had also paid the price at the time when he published Don't tell your brother, in 2022. A certain number of feminist voices then criticized the comments made by Shalev during a television interview given to channel 12. In this interview, the writer criticized the #metoo movement for making life difficult for “good men” and to be a “combat organization” whose automatic fire hit innocent people. This man of the left was then accused of conservatism, mocked as “retarded boomer” unable to understand the radical change in the rules of the game between men and women.

Breathtakingly beautiful

In his own way, the character of Itamar, as he is portrayed in the novel, embodies a way of responding to these criticisms, as he blurs the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine, while remaining within the framework of virility. heterosexual. Endowed with breathtaking beauty, he oscillates between donjuanism and the passivity attributed to women in games of seduction. But, as magnificent as his physical appearance remains on the verge of old age, Itamar's existence nonetheless reflects the reflection of a failure or a mediocre person, left by Michal, the love of his life, and who was able to rebuild almost nothing after their separation. As if having in hand all the assets of a successful sentimental existence in no way guarantees the outcome.

Conceived as the narration, made by Itamar to Boaz, of another adventure of traumatic encounter, the plot superimposes temporalities and perspectives with the mastery of the novelist, who was at the top of his art. While the protagonist relates a trap imposed by a manipulative woman, Sharon, the brother's interventions and acerbic comments in this conversation held twenty years later seem completely natural, to the point of transforming the situation into an imaginary threesome.

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