Her Body Knows: Two Novellas

A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice. In Her Body Knows a fevered storyteller and a captive audience revisit the past together in each of David Grossmans novellas trying to make sense of a betrayal that neither one can put to rest.. In Frenzy reserved respectable Shaul lets his sister-in-law Esti into a secret nightmare as he reveals to her his conviction that his wife is having an affair. Along with Esti we find ourselves trapped in his paranoia and desperation as we accompany the odd pair down Israels highways on a journey that reveals a passion perverted by jealousy and self-loathing.. In the title story a successful but embittered novelist visits her mother who is in the last stages of cancer. Grossman investigates the powers of storytelling to harm and heal as the daughter reads aloud her own imagined merciless account of her mothers love affair with a much younger teenage boy. Gradually it becomes clear that for all its anger the daughters story and the writing process itself have led her to a new appreciation of her mothers difficult character and her own.. Studies in obsession claustrophobia and the need to confess these two novellas mark a new departure from a writer who has been for nearly two decades the one of the most original and talented ... anywhere. (The New York Times Book Review).