You­val Shimoni’s A Room makes an impres­sion from the start.

Is form min­i­mizes con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive in favor of long inte­ri­or mono­logues. Very lit­tle actu­al­ly hap­pens in terms of plot. Instead, long sequences of the char­ac­ters’ pass­ing thoughts and mem­o­ries flow through its 600 pages, much like the free asso­ci­a­tions that run through anyone’s mind in the course of a day.

The book com­pris­es three dis­tinct sto­ries which at first seem unre­lat­ed, apart from a shared inter­est in the act of cre­at­ing works of art. The Lamp, the first and by far the longest, observes an army film crew as it pre­pares to make a short instruc­tion­al movie intend­ed for new recruits. One thing we know from the out­set: a fire will erupt, tak­ing the life of one of the men. Until that acci­dent occurs, the crew pre­pares the equip­ment, arranges the makeshift set, and rehears­es a bit of the dia­logue in a sin­gle room on an Israeli army base.

Through­out the prepa­ra­tions, the minds of the actors and the tech­ni­cal team flash back to their youth­ful aspi­ra­tions and plea­sures. They rec­ol­lect their trav­els and cel­e­bra­tions, failed rela­tion­ships, unful­filled dreams. Those thoughts over­whelm the mea­ger nar­ra­tive: after a sen­tence or two describ­ing what’s hap­pen­ing on the set, there’s often a full page recall­ing a character’s regrets and long­ings from the past.

Which do we val­ue more, art or real life? In the sec­ond sto­ry, The Draw­er, an artist’s girl­friend stout­ly main­tains, ​“Life is right here,” in the kitchen or the park or the super­mar­ket. For her, life is not in her boyfriend’s paint­ings, or in cin­e­ma or in the mind: it lies in every­day events.

The stu­dent artist in this tale ful­fills a professor’s assign­ment by gath­er­ing three home­less peo­ple to pose for a paint­ing, an homage to Andrea Mantegna’s Lamen­ta­tion of Christ. The artist envi­sions this lat­ter-day con­tem­pla­tion of the body of the cru­ci­fied Jesus in a shiny, met­al-and-porce­lain hos­pi­tal morgue. To the extent that he is exploit­ing, even endan­ger­ing, his mod­els for the sake of his art, valu­ing art over life becomes a prac­ti­cal and moral ques­tion, not just philosophical.

Shi­moni departs from the pat­tern of the first two sec­tions of the book in its coda, a myth­ic sto­ry called The Throne. There is no stream of con­scious­ness here. It’s a leg­end in which the king of the realm has con­ceived an artis­tic project on a mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal scale. In grat­i­tude to the deity who, he believes, has grant­ed him a great mil­i­tary vic­to­ry, he calls for a memo­r­i­al sculp­ture so immense that it will extend the full length of a moun­tain range, with every­one in the king­dom and all their cap­tured slaves con­script­ed to build it.

The plan keeps chang­ing, how­ev­er, and years lat­er there are mul­ti­ple accounts of what actu­al­ly took place. One claims that the mon­u­ment was a per­fect sphere — so large that, when it was acci­den­tal­ly set in motion, it rolled over vil­lages, crush­ing the sum­mer cap­i­tal and the win­ter cap­i­tal, and flood­ing the entire land when the sphere fell into the sea. In this fable, human life counts for noth­ing when art is deified.

If a com­mon thread runs through the three sec­tions of A Room, it is a warn­ing against the arro­gance of the artist and a lament for the human con­di­tion. A man dies in a fire in an attempt to make an unim­por­tant film; a man may die in the course of pos­ing for an art-school project; a whole coun­try may be crushed by its king’s lim­it­less ambi­tion to cre­ate an endur­ing work.

As a sto­ry­teller, You­val Shi­moni has a rare capac­i­ty to imag­ine the par­tic­u­lars of his char­ac­ters’ lives, in aston­ish­ing pro­fu­sion. When A Room was pub­lished in Israel in 1999, it was imme­di­ate­ly hailed as an extra­or­di­nary lit­er­ary achieve­ment, and pres­ti­gious Israeli lit­er­ary awards soon fol­lowed. Shimoni’s Eng­lish trans­la­tor, Michael Sharp, ren­ders his many flights of inven­tion into live­ly, vibrant Eng­lish. Read­ers may have trou­ble absorb­ing the immense amount of quo­tid­i­an detail as it accu­mu­lates over sev­er­al hun­dred pages, and for some it may not be worth the effort. But for those who per­sist, beyond a cer­tain point the minu­ti­ae of the char­ac­ters’ lives add lit­tle to our under­stand­ing of them, or what becomes of them. What lingers in the mind is Shimoni’s sym­pa­thy for human frailty, his impa­tience with artis­tic ambi­tion, and his sad­ness at the exis­ten­tial lone­li­ness of being human.

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