Lapid, Haim 1948-

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LAPID, Haim 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born 1948, in Israel.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Toby Press, P.O. Box 8531, New Milford, CT 06776-8531. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Teacher, social psychologist, organizational consultant, film critic, film script writer, and fiction writer. Military service: Israel Defense Forces, paratrooper.

WRITINGS:

Reshimotav ha-nistarot shel segani: roman, Sifriyat po'alim (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1983, published as Secret Notes of My Deputy.

Breznitz, Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1992, translated by Yael Lotan, published as Breznitz,, Toby Press (Milford, CT), 2000.

Ahavot rishonot: sipurim te'udiyim Yi'sre'eliyim, Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1993.

Meshikhah negdit, Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1995.

Pesha' ha-ketivah, ha-Kibuts ha-me'uhad (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1998, translation by Yael Lotan, published as The Crime of Writing, Toby Press (Milford, CT), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Haim Lapid was born near Tel Aviv, Israel. A teacher of social and behavioral psychology, he is also an organizational consultant in Israel's high tech industry. As well as writing books, he writes film scripts for the television and movie industries, and is a film critic. Breznitz, translated into English, French, German, and Italian, has received popular critical acclaim by reviewers in those countries.

A critic writing for the Buffalo News called Breznitz an "engrossing" story of a homicide investigator who, while recovering from an almost fatal car accident, becomes obsessed with solving the murder of an unidentified man whose body is found near Jerusalem. Although an Arabian suspect is arrested and confesses, Breznitz believes him innocent. On a personal level, Breznitz is overwhelmed by the breakup of his extramarital affair and ruminates on what the critic called his "inner hollowness." Lev Raphael commented in Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service that the book is a "fine police procedural," and Victoria Esposito-Shea, writing for Hand Held Crime online called it "an existentialist examination of life …by no means light fiction. It's more like reading the great Russian novelists." A reviewer for Library Journal wrote: "This is a disturbing, probing book, unlikely to be forgotten."

The Crime of Writing fuses reality and fantasy to explore sexual identity and the triangle created by woman, man, and child. It also explores the underlying connection between life and literature. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called it a "muddled" story about a young Israeli woman who meets an older Englishman, George Brown, on a trip to London. After the woman returns to Israel, Brown dies and she receives his letters, which are in fact his confessions. The woman's novelist husband—the story's narrator—publishes the correspondence, in which Brown relates his lifelong search for the mother who abandoned him in childhood. Brown's fifty-year-long obsession poisons his life. The Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that The Crime of Writing "wanders off into a series of murky ruminations about the so-called 'crime' of writing," and commented that, while Lapid's characters are well developed, the meandering tale "makes for a difficult, tangled read." On the other hand, a reviewer for Library Journal described the book as "intelligent, sensitive and tense."