The Drive

(Paperback)

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This searing novel tells the journey of a young Israeli soldier, accompanied by his father on drive to meet with a military psychiatrist because he can no longer tolerate army life. Yair Assulin penetrates the torn world of the hero, whose journey is npt just that of a young man facing a crucial dilemma, but a tour of the soul and depths of Israeli

Reviews

"A beautifully written, formidable and moving tale about the boundaries between an individual and the collective."
--Shani Boianjiu, author of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

"The Drive represents a new landmark in Israeli fiction ... Israel's own The Catcher in the Rye, its narrator--like Holden Caulfield--a too-sensitive young man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Like Holden, he has a nose for phoniness and can see through the false bravado and cruelty of Israel's military infrastructure. And, like Salinger's novel, The Drive reveals the fault lines in a national narrative ... Assulin delivers powerfully."
--The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Reading The Drive in these times ... feels nearly like a political act. The soldier's mental conflict feels like our very own. Can we take a break from the news cycle, from being perpetually battle-ready, from speaking, writing, reacting and just spend a morning with a poem anymore ... A novel that is really a manual for what it takes to be an individual in a country today."
--Open Magazine

"Poignant ... Assulin shines at depicting the soldier's feelings of unease and the irreconcilable space between soldier and commander ... This work on the fragility of the human spirit is touching."
--Publishers Weekly

"Prize-winning debut ... exemplifies the individual's battle against larger forces ... An unexpected story of resistance to military life, sobering and nuanced."
--Library Journal

"The most remarkable part of this book may be in its exploration of how impossible the mentally healthy find it to participate in the journey of the mentally ill .... A superb debut from one of Israel's younger prize-winning authors."
--Literary Hub

"An intense, com-pact work that presents a point of view on Israeli life that may be unfa-mil-iar and quite sur-pris-ing to non-Israelis ... The nov-el presents a ver-sion of the eter-nal con-flict between the indi-vid-ual and soci-ety ... The Dri-ve reveals facets of mod-ern Israeli cul-ture not usu-al-ly known out-side of Israel."
--Jewish Book Council

"Assulin is an assured and accomplished writer, and his short novel captures and holds our attention, roils our emotions, and challenges our comfortable assumptions. Above all, the author is fully aware he has created a character who is both troubled and troubling, and he makes no apology for it."
--Jewish Journal

"The sort of soul-level struggling that makes great fiction possible. The translator, Jessica Cohen, is responsible for translations of Israeli literary giants with fans in America like David Grossman, Amos Oz and Etgar Keret, and one can only hope that her name on Assulin's work means that we'll be seeing more from him on our shelves soon."
--The Jewish Exponent

"A powerful, compelling and fascinating look inside the mind of a young man as he struggles to find his way in life, grasping to balance the expectations of his family, romantic partner, and country with his own troubled sense of who he is."
--Joseph LeDoux, author of Anxious and The Deep History of Ourselves

"The Drive serves up the mesmerizing story of a young Israeli torn between his own powerlessness and his lust to live. Suffocated by an army base he calls a 'kingdom of slaves, ' he journeys to a mental health clinic on which he pins all his hopes of redemption. In the grip of Assulin's bracing novel, those hopes become ours."
--Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka's Last Trial

"Assulin's novel is impressive in its breadth. His hero, like Joseph Heller's Yossarian in Catch-22, is a young man struggling to make sense of the world and himself amid the surreal madness of war."
--David Margulies, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner With Friends

"The Drive is raw, poignant, tense, terse, and brutally honest. We see, hear and feel a soldier's soul shredding until all he has left is the wish to die. This book shatters ideals and illusions about glorious and patriotic military service."
--Edward Tick, author of War and the Soul and Warrior's Return

"The Drive is a psychologically astute book--a good read concluding with an insightful, hilarious depiction of mental health professionals engineering a way for the protagonist to preserve his dignity while getting the help he badly needs."
--Thomas Ogden, psychoanalyst and author of The Parts Left Out

"A touching, gut-wrenching work. It is astounding and troubling at the same time."
--Makor Rishon

"Assulin lays bare the emotional distress of a person, any person, and the world's inability to understand it except by means of mechanical categories from the field of psychiatry."
--Benny Ziffer, Haaretz

"One can compare the story to the biblical journey of Abraham and Isaac to Mount Moriah, where God commanded that father bind and sacrifice his son."
--Yedioth Ahronoth

"Shattering ... expressing a complicated mental situation, uncovering in a uniquely direct way painful truths about one of the most significant days in the lives of Israeli young people."
--Ynet

Author Bio

Yair Assulin, born in 1986, studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Drive is the first of two novels he has written and for which he won Israel's Ministry of Culture Prize and the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. He has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for authors, writes a weekly column in the newspaper Haaretz and has been a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Yale. Jessica Cohen shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon and Nir Baram.