Shimon Adaf

שמעון אדף

נימוקי חבר השופטים לפרס הביכורים של משרד החינוך בו זכה הספר: שיריו של שמעון אדף מציירים תמונות חכמות בלשון כנה, פשוטה לכאורה. בטון אינטימי, כמעט דיבורי, מטעין אדף נוף בהירהור, ותחושה בנוף, עד שאפילו דמויות מיתולוגיות, הופכות אצלו לבנות בית. מצאנו בהם רגש קרוב ונגיש, כמו גם מרחק של מחשבה, שימוש טבעי שאף פעם לא בנאלי בשפה, והרבה בהירות ועומק. באמצעות דימויים ישירים ולשון לא מצועצעת יוצר אדף יופי מפוכח. השירים מתאפיינים לכאורה בראיה "בוגרת", נקיה מרומנטיקה, אך האווירה הרומנטית מרחפת בשולי התודעה לפני שהיא נדחית, ונוכחותה יוצרת מתח שירי ומתח רעיוני מעניין.

שירים

המונולוג של איקרוס

  In Shimon Adaf’s sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken has retired from investigating and taken up writing detective novels—but when a new case draws him to a town on the Israel-Gaza border, he faces an existential threat unlike any he’s ever known in A Detective's Complaint...

A Detective's Complaint

In One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, the first volume of a trilogy by the celebrated Israeli poet, novelist, and musician Shimon Adaf, meet Elish Ben Zaken: a lapsed rock critic, sometime philosopher, and wholly unlikely private investigator...

A Novel

One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset

"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone In A Detective's Complaint, the sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken has traded working as a private investigator for writing detective novels based on unsolved cases from the past. He appears to live an ordinary writer’s life: meeting with his agent, attending literary conferences. But all is not quite right with Elish, who cannot escape his past so easily, especially when his sister’s daughter, Tahel, a teenager and an aspiring sleuth herself, calls on him for help. Tahel has uncovered a mystery: a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot, close to the Gaza border, on Sunday evening. A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days, and the young woman remembers none of it. To assist Tahel—and, he tells himself, to conduct research for his next novel—Elish moves back to Sderot, where he grew up. His sister, Yaffa, has moved her family from Tel Aviv to a new lakeside development there; the property came cheap, despite the attractive setting, and there are murmurs that the developer fled the country before it was completed. Some of the houses still stand empty, and Tahel keeps waking up at night to find her mother staring out at the lake, convinced she is being watched. Now, in the summer of 2014, Sderot lies near the center of the Gaza–Israel conflict, and sirens and missile strikes are part of the town’s daily reality—as are violent clashes between anti-war protestors and those who oppose them. In this pressurized environment, Elish must grapple with the deep wounds of history, both personal and political, and the human need for answers in a world that offers few.

רומן בלשי

קילומטר ויומיים לפני השקיעה

In the original text alongside the English translation, Adaf blends contemporary colloquial Hebrew, Arabic, and old Aramaic with biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic intertextualities. The collection is a powerful lamentation for Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died at 43. Written from a witness of Israeli society, the daily violence taking place makes the grief reverberating through the poems both personal and palpable.

Aviva-no

In Take Up and Read concluding volume of Shimon Adaf’s genre-exploding detective trilogy, Elish Ben-Zaken is dead—it seems—but his niece, living in a grim, militaristic future, won't give up the investigation of her uncle’s cold cases...

Shimon Adaf

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