When I read David Grossman’s tempestuous More Than I Love My Life, these lines return, there being only a couple of years between my melodramatic adolescent performance and the state of falling in love with Grossman’s novels. ‘Falling in love’ is an apposite reaction to literature whose emotional states are porous. Proctor’s lines reverberate because much of the novel’s tragedy turns on a similar scenario. While Arthur Miller was inspired by the Salem witch trials and contemporary McCarthyism, Grossman’s muse is Eva Panić Nahir, ‘a well-known and admired figure in Yugoslavia’ who was a friend of the writer and who asked him to tell her story.

Vera is a fictionalised Eva. Like the secrets of the past that are forever at play, her name is only partially obscured. Vera’s fulgence drives much of the story; she insinuates herself into the reader’s bones in the way of her literary predecessor, Ora, from Grossman’s majestic To the End of the Land (2008). A refugee in Israel, she is a stark refutation of our unsound expectations regarding what a victim of torture looks like. When the past is slowly revealed, it is stained in mythic proportions.

Vera’s brutal choice – informed by an idealism that scorches anything placed in its path and by an extreme love for her husband – triggers a domino effect of traumatic repercussions that tip over into future lives. More Than I Love My Life represents a state of love so fervent that it risks obliterating others in its wake, a pattern then re-enacted by the next generation. While Vera’s act of betrayal attracts the same visceral repulsion that a reader feels for Medea’s infanticide, this is not a moralistic tale. Vera is not monstrous; she is, however, formidably charismatic. The air seems to thrum with industriousness as she incessantly cares for those in her orbit, despite being ninety. It is no coincidence that her daughter, Nina, is not there. In Grossman’s Vera there are echoes of the real-life Vera Wasowski, a flamboyant, complex presence who initially slips from Maria Tumarkin’s literary grasp only to find her unresolved place in Axiomatic (2018). Both women share a history that attempts to annihilate them (Vera as a child, Eva as a young woman) coupled with a personality that fluctuates from steeliness to magnificence.

This intense epic, one that endlessly moves between layers of the past, evokes both The Thousand and One Nights and The Odyssey. Despite being narrated by Israeli-born Gili, Nina’s daughter, the novel is polyphonic. Gili is a close observer; as a film continuity supervisor, she is attuned to any tear in the narrative seam. She is at once a teller of tales and a reluctant repository of them. Her name, translatable as ‘my Joy’ or the exclamatory ‘Rejoice!’, extends the fatal irony of tone apparent in the book’s original Hebrew title, roughly meaning ‘Life Plays With Me’. Gili adores Vera, the great family matriarch, but is also wary of her. Jessica Cohen’s elegant translation captures the tangle of language: what people say and how they say it – there is abundant humour in Vera’s idiosyncratic immigrant tongue – and what is suppressed.

The book’s opening tale concerns Gili’s parents’ mythic first encounter; the story shifts in and out of family lore and tragedy of biblical or Ancient Greek proportions. How else to speak of these excessive ruptures? Gili is a stuttering presence, forever in the margins, the live fallout of the catastrophic Event, unable to claim for herself the love her mother denied. Her voice is diffuse and tentative unlike the blistering assault of Dovale in A Horse Walks Into a Bar (2014) or Aron’s prodigious loquacity in The Book of Intimate Grammar (1991). But they are united, as are so many of Grossman’s singular characters, by their close intimacy with pain.

That the other characters are sometimes more fascinating than the narrator, one suspects, is because Gili has spent her lifetime effacing herself. The family odyssey is as much to claim her own self as it is to uncover the truth, and in this she finds an unlikely partner in her estranged, enigmatic mother. Avoidance of the past has acted as a noxious gas, invisible but pervasive. Memory’s potential for holding us, but also for holding us hostage, is the book’s warp and weft. Extreme states are Gili’s family’s normality: there is forever too much or too little.

While absolute redemption might be an impossible endpoint, the possibility of grace is found in bearing witness. Grossman is acutely attuned to this idea in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian experience; listening to each other’s stories, particularly those that are unsaid, is to render the other recognisable.

Judith Butler has written that human vulnerability lies in being ‘in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy’. More Than I Love My Life is about the double implications of this phrase: it may be wielded as a sharp blade by those we are most vulnerable to or proffered as tender care. Grossman understands this truth, and it is through compassion that he is able to locate hope.