Yuval Yareach​

 

Yuval Yareach was born 1971 in Hod Hasharon, Israel. He holds a degree in Social Sciences from the University of Haifa. In the 1990s, he participated in creative writing workshops with authors A.B. Yehoshua and Ortzion Bartana. In 2013, he transitioned to teaching and is now a high school English and Computer teacher. His first books were the short story collection The Yearning (2000) and The Naked Dictionary (2003). His novel The Silences (2016), which tells the story of his grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, was a bestseller and received critical acclaim. Blind Spot is his third novel.

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Blind Spot

Novel

256 pp.

Publisher: Kinneret Zmorah Bitan

Year: 2024

 

Translation rights: World 

Audio visual rights: World

Translations:

 

Inspector Yair Yamin can speak to the dead. He listens to what their remains tell him about the story of their lives, trying to understand how they perished. In this investigation, too, he focuses all his efforts on listening, attempting to solve the mystery surrounding the identity and fate of a skeleton discovered in the Negev desert, next to a Bedouin settlement. But the clamor of mounting evidence, as suspects are ruled out one by one, and the information piling up threatens to drown out Yair’s inner voice. He finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into a world of violence and exploitation, a world of men taking whatever they please and women being reduced to commodities. This conjures guilt-ridden memories, alongside his failure to protect a woman under his care, the thickening silence of his wife, and the growing distance from his only son. As every step forward in the investigation only seems to push the solution further away, the horizon slips further and further from Yair’s grasp. Blind Spot is a gripping work that constantly oscillates between the poetic and the technical, sweeping the readers into a torrential and whirling stream of consciousness that plunges them into the protagonist’s conflicted soul. This is a dark, realistic detective story offering a jarring glimpse into the collapse of silent and alienated toxic masculinity, carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction.

 

 

Critical Praise

 

Yuval Yareach’s bright and daring novel disguises itself as a police detective story yet it aims to unearth disturbing truths about women’s exploitation. In the best tradition of noir fiction, it presents a lonely, tormented investigator haunted by past trauma, exposed to the worst imaginable human evil, and forced to confront it morally and emotionally on his way to solving the mystery. But this seemingly familiar genre framework serves as bait, and a trap that becomes increasingly clear as the murder investigation progresses. Clues are examined, suspects are arrested and interrogated, yet the investigation is stuck. Out of this vacuum emerges the chronicle of a different death, unfolding in the novel’s final lines, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to a detective story. This literary structure, that is gradually revealed  is sophisticated and brilliant, as it directly addresses the issues at the heart of the novel...

 

Depicting a horrifying world of slavery, rape, and abuse always poses a challenge for writers, walking a tightrope between a realistic portrayal of violence and suffering and elements of voyeuristic thrills bordering on exploitation. The horrors shock the readers but also evokes a sense of moral superiority and relief: these lives, however terrible, are distant and other. Crime stories set in this territory often emphasize the triumph of the human spirit, of survivors of exploitation or the detective who brings the culprits to justice. This literary stance reinforces the cathartic effect of confronting such realities and, symbolically, reproduces the exploitation it critiques. Yuval Yerach is acutely aware of this trap. “In TV shows, they manage to find the killer, but in real life, what are the chances, after 20 years, for a hooker no one cared about?” he writes.

 

The narrator follows Yamin’s internal monologue, recounting it in a rough and authentic language, yet he also intervenes in the plot, commenting on it, addressing characters directly, and occasionally even the readers. The novel is deliberately artificial; it exposes the illusion that literature can mediate or resolve such horrors. Gradually, the real story is revealed: this is not a tale of delayed justice but of how evil ultimately defeats those who witness it. The violence Yamin encounters every day alienates him from others. Like an infectious disease, it festers within him, leaving no clear path for release. Yuval Yerach’s novel is sophisticated, harrowing, and daring. Its title, Blind Spot, does not refer to the detective struggling to understand what happened to Anna in the desert, far from her home and family. It refers to the consciousness of the readers. The vision the book presents is deeply unsettling. I usually read at night before bed, but in the case of this book, I couldn’t sleep.

Omry Herzog, Haaretz

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