Mr. Joseph Schimmel - a Francophile, a loser who was fired from his job as a teacher from abroad in the failed department of French culture at the university - is increasingly withdrawing from his real estate achievement, an apartment in the center of the Tel Aviv hustle and bustle in the heart of an eternal traffic jam, where he is well protected among his belongings and his covetousness, while silencing the outside and blocking its views and the air pollution in it. He lives a life in which "the only task he imposes on himself as a person is to live, with all the maintenance of the house and the contents of the house which also includes it"; according to him, the house is the essence of existence, "what you have in life is What you have at home and what you have in the parking lot of the …
Mr. Joseph Schimmel - a Francophile, a loser who was fired from his job as a teacher from abroad in the failed department of French culture at the university - is increasingly withdrawing from his real estate achievement, an apartment in the center of the Tel Aviv hustle and bustle in the heart of an eternal traffic jam, where he is well protected among his belongings and his covetousness, while silencing the outside and blocking its views and the air pollution in it. He lives a life in which "the only task he imposes on himself as a person is to live, with all the maintenance of the house and the contents of the house which also includes it"; according to him, the house is the essence of existence, "what you have in life is What you have at home and what you have in the parking lot of the house." 'Biotope' summons us to a brilliant anatomy of the absurdities of the 'real estate identity', a distinctly Israeli phenomenon, colored here in the shades of Castelbloom poetics. Joseph Schimmel, who leaves his apartment only for necessary errands and for trips dictated by the needs of the dachshund-like dog he adopted, does not stray far from the immediate surroundings of the London Ministry, but this environment provides his pedantic observations with countless colorful homeless people, the negation of the real estate identity, which the wealth of the unique characteristics of Each one of them is one of the pleasures of the book. All these enslaved to their assets (or lack of assets), together with the residents of the two towers of the wealthy who star in the book, allow Castle Bloom to catalog a series of clichés of the Tel Aviv "biotope". The so-called meticulous realism of their description is accompanied by A wink of cheerful and surprising surrealism. The plot of the book accelerates when Schimmel begins to leave home to house in Israel immigrants from France, and especially when his Francophile identity unites with his identity as a landlord: he inherits a house in Normandy. Soon his life is invaded and an extraordinary drama of criminals, with a climate political, which gradually expropriates his assets and leaves him as someone who is no longer able to connect with himself. In the end, the impersonal anti-hero of 'Biotope' becomes a sympathetic character, whose upheavals touch our hearts, and also thanks to this, the novel joins the first line of unforgettable books by Castel - Bloom.
Sortir de Biotope et faire le point sur sa lecture est une expérience assez étrange. Parce que, finalement, il ne s'est pas passé grand-chose. La vie d'un homme aux racines multiculturelles, juif par son père, chrétien par sa mère, qui tente, comme tout un chacun, de vivre une bonne vie, une vie tranquille et loin des problèmes financiers. Dans un monde insensé où tout un chacun s'occupe — égoïstement — de survivre, notre personnage fonce dans les ennuis sous nos yeux, nous laissant perplexes quant à la psyché de notre homme.
Et pourtant, le talent de l'autrice est tel que nous sommes emportés dès les premières pages. Elle dresse avec brio la sociologie d'un monde déroutant où femmes et hommes avancent, parfois acteurs, parfois spectateurs de leur propre existence.
