Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally Book

It is a fascinating book. Here we have a writer who writes about her craft and what goes underneath as one creates. Right at the start, she defends dream as something significant, and powerfully argues that they should not be dismissed as useless We embrace the rational or the real to feel safe, and avoid the irrational, dream-like tropes of our existence because that is unsettling. An artist should penetrate the realm of the dream because it contains key to 'knowing.'

She further illustrates how the dream contains so much that is of immense worth by giving telling examples from Joyce, Lawrence and Kafka. According to her, conscious mind is a construct. It is regulated by everyday forces, whereas the unconscious accumulates pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images- it is freed from, or least damaged, from the regulations imposed by society. She writes that the creative personality never remains fixed on the first world its discover. It never resigns, or submits; it goes on exploring and stays, forever, mobile.

What I liked about this work is that the author talks about things that she knows, or what she has discovered through the process of writing; such as how to write a character. She probably discovered her writerly struggles, or what she found at the core of creating something fresh and imaginative, in the works of writers like herself.

Since she fiercely speaks from her experience of writing and reading, she does not come across as dogmatic. Even the prose style reflects her passion, conviction and an acute desire to communicate what she has discovered about the fiction writing, or creating a work of art- the writing style does not hide itself in convoluted formations, but states clearly its theories.