I met with Alona Kimhi at a Czech café in New York’s West Village on a furiously rainy day this past spring. She was still shaking the rain off her trenchcoat as we sat down to talk about her latest book, Lily La Tigresse, translated by Dalya Bilu, which follows Lily, the book’s dental hygienist heroine, as she navigates the perilous waters of her various relationships—with her close female friends, with the men in her life, and ultimately, with a tiger cub she’s forced into close quarters with. Kimhi is a vigorous conversationalist. She speaks in avid pronouncements, peppering her talk with confidential asides and wickedly funny observations which she delivers with a mixture of expectation and blankness. She skips without punctuation between topics and it’s hard, in retrospect, to surmise what the connection might have been between Alison Bechdel, Agatha Christie, brushing one’s teeth, and Lermontov—but Kimhi, like her book, charms through excess, producing logic and sympathy between distal parts of life and literature.
Rohan Kamicheril: Apart from being strikingly psychological, it’s hard not to notice that your book is also very funny. What are your thoughts on humor in literature?
Alona Kimhi: It’s irreplaceable. Even though there are a lot of good books without humor. When I was young I read very funny books—Americans as well, like O. Henry—and Sholem Aleichem, who is a Yiddish writer, and I read Russian. I read very funny writers, and I loved it and it affected me. I fear boredom. Maybe it’s not good because it’s like being a clown. But I don’t use humor out of a desire to be liked. I just need it to get myself going. And life is funny.
