Introduction

The Dead Man is a beautiful, passionate, intelligent book. Eve is a composer who can’t recover from a brief relationship she once had with a world-famous music critic named Jake. Her obsession with Jake is a mystery to her friends and also to her, so to solve it she “returns to the scene of the crime” - where she and Jake fell in love - and revisits all their old haunts. Gradually the dark mystery behind this complex relationship unravels. The Dead Man is a powerful, moving novel about love, loss, and the power to overcome one’s past and triumph over darkness.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1: Overture

She’s never been obsessed before. This is her first time and it’s kind of interesting. It’s like watching some psychopath in a movie, stalking someone, plotting to kill them, except that the psychopath is her. In Canada it’s not so bad — she can’t call Jake from Toronto because he’d see the area code and guess it was her. So it’s only in his country, in Israel (where she’ll be in ninety minutes) that it happens. There she won’t be able to walk by a pay phone without having to wrestle down the desire to do again what she has already done numerous times: Dial his number and then keep silent on the end of the line — an ominous, threatening silence. And then hear the anger mount in his voice as he says, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” And then, when he gets no answer, he’ll slam down the phone with a bang so loud that it hurts her ear. When Jake’s wife answers the phone, though, it’s not anger; it’s fear. Instead of her voice getting stronger and more violent like Jake’s, Fran’s gets smaller and thinner (“Hello? Hello? Hello?”) till at the end there’s almost nothing left of it. It’s a high and squeaky-scared voice, like a mouse or a little girl. On one of the last times, though, instead of going squeaky-scared on her third hello, Fran gathered all her remaining strength and called out “Jake!” in a loud, frightened voice — calling him, Eve knew, from the phone on the kitchen counter to Jake’s study upstairs. Then Eve hung up fast before Jake could come on the line, and stood in front of the orange pay phone on a Tel Aviv street corner, her knees trembling and her hands sweaty. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1) Do you believe there is a “right” or “normal” amount of time it should take to get over someone you’ve loved? And if so, how long is “too long”?

2) Eve’s friends kept telling her to just forget about Jake and “move on,” but she was not able to. Why do you think she couldn’t?

3) What do you think of the relationship between Eve and Jake? Do you know anyone who has been in a relationship like that?

4) At the beginning of the novel, Eve is “stuck” in her creative process and is unable to finish the piece she’s been working on for a long time. What do you think helps Eve to get unstuck later on and to begin composing again?

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