their obsession with the past, neither nostalgic nor inspiring, but menacing, a reminder to the new generation that they could never achieve what past generations have. This theme is also presented through the occupations of the three main characters: Israel's piano playing, Goldman's translations and Caesar's photography all require a prior model or text - they can only reflect reality, and never create anything original. Stream of consciousness The flow of the narrative mixes past and present, thoughts and events, to create a stream of consciousness that moves from one character's mind to another, often through objects and experiences: The prolonged paragraph replicates the exceptional intimacy of a society whose members are bound together by stronger-than-family ties and can hardly visit their parents or walk along the beach or drive to a funeral or an assignation without recalling who lived where and when or who had done what, where, and how. The stream of collective consciousness Shabtai uses creates significant juxtapositions between events and produces irony. For example, when Shabtai presents the death of Aryeh, one of Caesar's relatives, the minor details brought up throughout the account puncture the tragic event: [Aryeh] shot himself in the mouth with a pistol and was found two days later in his car on a dirt road between orange groves not far from the sea dressed in a leather suit and a floral shirt and a yellow tie, and Erwin and Caesar, who took the wooden mask of the African god from his mother and placed it on one of the shelves in the bookcase, went to identify the body in the morgue, because Yaffa and Tikva and also Zina, who looked at the mask absentmindedly and said, “Very nice,” couldn’t face it, and the two of them, together with Besh, told Yaffa, who fainted in the living room before they even told her, just as she had fainted when she heard that Tikva’s Hungarian engineer wasn’t an engineer, knocking over her cup and spilling the coffee, and Caesar made haste to pour cold water over her and the drops splashed onto Besh and Zina, who was trying to comfort her sister with a pale and frightened face but at the same time was filled with anger against her because of the whole business and because of the coffee stains spreading over the carpet and the wall, which Zina tried to clean with a