The Same Sea (Hebrew: Oto Ha-Yam) was published by Keter in 1999. The novel is Oz’s most formally daring work: written in short, numbered sections that alternate between prose and poetry, shifting freely between first, second, and third person, and dissolving the boundaries between narrator, author, and characters.
Albert Danon is a retired accountant living in a small apartment in Bat Yam, a seaside town south of Tel Aviv. His wife Nadia has recently died of cancer. His son Rico has gone traveling in Southeast Asia, and a young woman named Dita — once Rico’s girlfriend — is subletting Rico’s room. Albert is lonely, grieving, and drawn to Dita in ways that unsettle him. Nadia’s ghost appears periodically — not as a supernatural event but as a textual one: she speaks in the novel as a voice among other voices, and the distinction between the living and the dead is no more stable than the distinction between prose and verse.
Oz himself appears in the novel as a character: a figure called “the writer” who lives in Arad (as Oz did) and intervenes in the narrative, commenting on his characters, arguing with them, admitting that he cannot control them. This metafictional element is not playful postmodernism but something more tender: the writer’s inability to control his characters mirrors the characters’ inability to control their lives, and both mirror the human inability to control grief, desire, or time.
The sea of the title is the Mediterranean — visible from Bat Yam, audible at night, the element that connects all the novel’s scattered characters and that symbolizes the continuity beneath their separations.
Collecting The Same Sea
First English edition (Harcourt, New York, 2001): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15