Learning to be present

Long before Yoav Avni knew what being a writer involved, he knew he wanted to be one. By second or third grade, reading a book was no longer enough.

“I did not only want to disappear into it as a reader,” the Israeli author told The AJN. “I wanted to understand how it had been made, and eventually to be the person making one.”

Avni has since published nine books in Hebrew and works as a literary translator and writing mentor. He says that double instinct has stayed with him.

“There is always a double perspective: part of me stands slightly to the side, watching, noticing, listening; another part wants to enter the conversation, to connect, and to answer back,” he said. “Writing lets me do both at once.”

His latest book, Time Clocks, is now out in English, translated by Avni himself. Set in Tel Aviv, it follows a man named Boaz, who finds himself alongside three strangers from very different periods of history: Mazi, Lucien and Yatir.

The idea began with a thought about time itself.

“We can laugh, worry, grieve, fall in love, feel absurd and ask difficult questions, sometimes all within the same day.”

“I found myself thinking about how much attention we give to the past and the future,” Avni explained. “The past gets nostalgia, regret, memory; the future gets hope, fear, planning. The present, meanwhile, can become time’s overlooked middle child, the place where life is actually happening while our minds are somewhere else.”

The result is a story that brings people from different eras into one shared present, beside a man who belongs entirely to our own time.

“The three strangers have been torn out of their own time, while Boaz has never left his, and yet all four of them need, in different ways, to learn how to be where they are,” he said.

Avni said, though, it is not the usual time-travel story about going back, meeting your parents or changing history. He described it instead as “a time-travel novel about learning to be present”.

Time Clocks is funny, but it also takes on questions about time, artificial intelligence, memory and belonging. Avni does not see the two as opposites.

“Life itself is multilayered, and I think writing should be too,” he said. “We can laugh, worry, grieve, fall in love, feel absurd and ask difficult questions, sometimes all within the same day.”

He names Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Jerome K. Jerome, Douglas Adams and Gerald Durrell among his influences, saying plot and characters come first, and the larger questions follow.

“The ideal is when a reader can laugh on one page, feel something on the next, and only later realise that the book has left a question behind.”

To make several periods feel convincing, Avni researched 1980s Israel, nineteenth-century France and the biblical world, along with early computing, time clocks and the history and language of artificial intelligence.

He says what interests him most is “the small detail that makes a world feel lived in”. How someone speaks, what they recognise, and what confuses them.

Research, though, has to know when to stop. As a mentor to beginner writers, he often sees people “researching forever instead of actually writing”. Once the world feels true, he suggested, characters should take over.

As for translating his own book, Avni explained that he has translated many books from English into Hebrew, but working in the opposite direction on his own novel was a very different experience.

He wanted to keep the book’s voice and its sense of place, while trusting the story to travel.

“I also believe that plot and characters are everything,” he said. “If they are alive, they can cross languages.”

He treated the English edition as another stage of writing rather than a separate job. 

“I wanted the same fingers on the keyboard, the same eyes on the characters, and the same reader in mind.”

That sometimes meant reshaping a sentence, a rhythm or a nuance rather than carrying the Hebrew across word for word.

“The goal was not to move the book from one language to another, but to preserve its heart,” he explained.

And as for what readers take away from his novel, Avni pointed to David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water, in which an older fish asks two young fish, “How’s the water?” One of them later asks the other, “What is water?”

He says the image stayed with him while writing because “the most important things in our lives can also be the things we notice least”. 

As for what he hope readers leave with, it’s all about an appreciation of what’s in front of them. 

“I hope readers come away with a little more awareness of the present, not in a mystical or self-help sense, but in a very ordinary human one: where we are, who is beside us, and what is happening before the moment becomes another memory,” he said. 

The English edition has only just been released, so Avni says it is too early to compare its reception with that of the Hebrew edition. Early responses are similar, though. Israeli readers connected with the humour, the mystery, the characters and the questions about time, and English-speaking readers appear to be responding to the same things.

“I have always believed that a story can be very local and still travel well if the characters feel real enough,” he says.

After nine books in Hebrew, he is now meeting readers who are encountering his work for the first time. 

“I’m very glad to introduce Time Clocks to readers in Australia.” 

Time Clocks is published by Roundfire Books and can be purchased via Amazon Australia.