"Set in an upper-middle-class Tel Aviv apartment building, this best-selling and warmly acclaimed Israeli novel examines the interconnected lives of its residents, whose turmoils, secrets, unreliable confessions, and problematic decisions reveal the ills of a society in the midst of an identity crisis"--

This is a book I really enjoyed reading. Three stories of three families, one on each of the three floors (up), stories structured based on Freud’s model of psyche – id, ego and super-ego. The id is the personality component which contains the human’s basic, instinctual drives; ego – “attempts to mediate between id and reality” (basically our desires and reality); super-ego works in contradiction with id, as it includes the individual’s ego ideals which criticizes and prohibits their drives, feelings and actions.

I recommend reading the book based on the structural model of psyche above.

“If anyone were to ask me what love is, I would say, The knowledge that, in a world of lies, there is one person who is totally honest with you and with whom you are totally honest, and there is the truth between you, even if it isn’t always spoken.”

“[…] when you live with a stubborn person, you gradually learn that if you don’t want to spend all your time fighting, you have to learn to give in.”

“People usually lose each other because one of them doesn’t have the patience to wait for the other one to be ready.”

“Sigmund Freud, you understand, was a very wise man, but last night, after I finished the last volume in the collection and put it on my night table, I thought that he made one mistake. The three floors of the psyche do not exist inside us at all! Absolutely not! They exist in the air between us and someone else, in the space between our mouths and the ears we are telling the story to. And if there is no one there to listen – there is no story. If there is no one we can tell our secrets to and sharpen our memories on and find consolation in, then we talk into an answering machine, Michael. The main thing is to talk to someone. Otherwise, alone, a person has no idea which of the three floors he is on, and he is doomed to grope in the dark for the light switch.”