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288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2015
The Encyclopedia of Ideas helped me remember that the first floor, which [Freud] called the id, contains all our impulses and urges. The middle floor is the ego, which tries to mediate between our desires and reality. And the uppermost level, the third floor, is the domain of His Majesty, the superego, which calls us to order sternly and demands that we take into account the effects of our actions on society.The original Hebrew title of Eshkol Nevo’s novel, Shalosh Qomot, apparently translates as “Three Stories,” which would have been a better title than the present one, assuming that the pun between “storey” and “story” still works. Literally, these are three novellas, each involving the residents of a given floor in an apartment building, in what one of them describes as “Bourgeoisville,” some way out of Tel Aviv. But this is indeed a novel, not just because of the minor references in each novella to the characters of the other two, but because of the moral themes running through all three. And between them, they exemplify Freud’s metaphor of the Id, ego, and superego, as in the quotation above.