The Last Interview, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, is Eshkol Nevo’s new novel where the main character, a popular Israeli writer, answers questions sent to him by a website editor. Printed in a fitting question/answer format, the questions mostly encompass the basic sort of inquiries that have been posed to authors since the dawn of the craft — where do you get your inspiration? Did you always know you would be a writer? — Nevo cleverly turns what would, otherwise, be just another redundant interview into an insightful piece of literature. He takes each question and almost never gives a straight-forward answer, sometimes going off on a complete tangent. These tangents, however, are not irrelevant, as he pieces together the story of his life — or the protagonist’s life, as it is never revealed if the protagonist is actually Nevo or a creation of his imagination.
Through the catalyst of rehashed questions, Nevo delves into the story of a writer who finds himself at a precipice, with the fibers of his life about to fall apart. The writer is sure his wife is going to leave him, his eldest daughter — whom he refers to as the apple of his eye — has left for boarding school, a tactic to get away from the father who has taken too many liberties stealing experiences from her life to use in his writing. His best friend is dying and at the end of the novel, we still don’t know if the affair that catapulted his wife into leaving him was real or imagined.
The story can easily become confusing if the reader doesn’t understand what Nevo is trying to do. Underneath the flip-flopping between what happened and what didn’t happen, whether the story is really based on his life or not, there’s a running thread that masters of the writing craft will understand: when you’re a writer, the lines between what is real and what isn’t become so blurred, after some time, it might be difficult to recall what the truth of a particular story was.
After doing some research on Nevo, one can quickly come to realize that he’s borrowed from his own life and distorted the truth, further emphasizing the theme of the story. Nevo seamlessly navigates the essence of this concept, showing us an intriguing, though perhaps frustrating, aspect of a writer’s life. He guides us through this ever-morphing artform to show us the many shapes it can take. He does this, all while revealing to us the touching story of a man who wants no more than to be able to expertly juggle all the curveballs life throws at him, keep his beloved family close and be able to answer his innate writing compulsion, as authentically as possible, when it calls to him.