ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Another one from the Novellas in November pile, finally getting itself read in February…

David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, to the acclaim of readers I follow at Goodreads.  (See Trish, Paul Fulcher, and John Purcell). I haven’t read any of the other shortlisted titles, so I don’t know if it was a worthy winner or not, but it is utterly compelling, both hilarious and painfully tragic by turns.

#Digression: I used to read most if not all of the books nominated for various prizes, reading them, that is,  because they were on the shortlist, not because I had them already.  Or because I was on a Shadow Jury.  Now I don’t.  I don’t say there are too many prizes because I think Lit Prizes and their shortlists are a good boost for author incomes, but there are too many for me to keep up with.

Anyway…

Google ‘a horse walks into a bar + punchline’ and you’ll find plenty of examples of this old chestnut, all of them really weak. So this is a perfect title for a story about a stand-up comedian who tells terrible, pathetic jokes.  But that’s not why most of the audience eventually walks out.  It’s not even because he routinely insults his audience, picks on individuals with hurtful commentary or because he satirises taboo topics such as the Holocaust and the occupation of Palestine.  No.  It’s because the comedian, Dovaleh G, is performing what is probably his swan song since he’s obviously not a well man, and his routine, such as it is, is an heroic effort to exorcise his demons.

The narrator is his erstwhile childhood friend, now a retired judge by name of Lazar, who has been asked to come along to evaluate the performance.  Not as a critic, but as someone who could perhaps see the uniqueness of Dov’s being, not just one among millions…

‘That thing, he said softly, “That comes out of person without his control? That thing that maybe only this one person in the world has?’

The radiance of personality, I thought. The inner glow. Or the inner darkness. The secret, the tremble of singularity. Everything that lies beyond the words that describe a person, beyond the things that happened to him and the things that went wrong and became warped in him. The same thing that years ago, when I was just starting out as a judge, I naïvely swore to look for in every person who stood before me, whether defendant or witness. The thing I swore I would never be indifferent to, which would be the point of departure for my judgment.’ (p.63)

In the course of the show, as Dov tells about the existential crisis of his life when he was fourteen, Lazar remembers how he betrayed their friendship.  Boys who had met and formed a bond at an after-school maths tutoring class, they found themselves at a quasi-military training camp for teenagers, learning the escape drills they might need in a country surrounded by hostile nations.  Lazar distances himself from Dov, turns his back on scenes of grotesque bullying, and never lets himself see Dov — because he knows that if it’s not Dov being bullied, it will be him.

Yes, metaphors abound in this novel.

Lazar does not even step up to ask why when Dov is suddenly pulled out of the camp and sent home. He never knows why Dov so suddenly left until this night in a bar in a town called Netanya…

And he never knew that for four hours of a nightmare journey home, Dov was going home for a funeral but did not know which one of his parents had died.  It can only be one or the other: he has no other relations for reasons he doesn’t need to explain. He tells his subdued audience how he juggled memories of them both in his mind, agonising over which one to hope for.  How he tallied up their parental crimes and misdemeanours in an obscene accounting.

The writing of this short novel is brilliant.  It alternates between Lazar’s personal reflections and observations, and Dov’s frenetic activity as he prances around the stage, hectoring, insulting and cajoling his audience, feeding them jokes when some of the patrons are less captivated and get restless with his life story. I’ve never been to a stand-up comedy routine, though I’ve seen snippets on TV, but I imagine this must be how it’s done.  Seeing snippets is like watching the highlights from a game of soccer, it can’t possibly be at that level of intensity for the whole performance.  There must be moments of contrast, timed carefully so that the performance never loses momentum.

Plus, not all the jokes are terrible.  I laughed out loud at a couple of them, but I won’t share them here because they are too rude.

PS Brilliant translation!

Author: David Grossman
Title: A Horse Walks into a Bar (סוס אחד נכנס לבר)
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Publisher: Vintage (2017), first published 2014
Cover design: not acknowledged
ISBN: 9781784704223, pbk., 198 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books $22.99

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