Books › Enemies, a love story
Enemies, a love story
First published 1972 · 365 pages
A darkly farcical and deeply anxious exploration of a traumatized man tangled in a web of his own lies.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like watching a slow-motion trainwreck orchestrated by a man who is simultaneously the conductor and the victim on the tracks. The narrative moves at a brisk, almost frenetic pace, driven by the protagonist's desperate, exhausting need to compartmentalize his increasingly absurd life. It is steeped in a claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing mood, where the shadows of unimaginable historical trauma loom over the mundane streets of mid-century New York. The prose is sharp and unsentimental, delivering dark, fatalistic humor that bites as much as it amuses. It is a brilliant, tragicomic experience that will delight readers who appreciate existential absurdity, deeply flawed characters, and stories that explore how the ghosts of the past make a mockery of the present.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- anxiety-inducing
- haunted
- frenetic
- Tone
- darkly comic
- fatalistic
- wry
- unsentimental
- neurotic
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- survivor's guilt · the absurdity of survival · inescapable past · self-sabotage · spiritual crisis
- The writing
- Sharp, unadorned, and unsentimental, carrying the rhythmic cadence of Yiddish storytelling laced with biting irony.
- The arc
- A frantic, spiraling descent from anxious evasion into inevitable, tragicomic collapse.
- Who it's for
- Readers who relish dark existential comedies and deeply flawed, haunted protagonists caught in webs of their own making.
Content notes
- Holocaust trauma
- suicide
- infidelity
- ideation of death
About the book
Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives; Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom.
Description from Open Library.
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