a horse walks into a bar by david grossman

That said, fair warning: Most of the jokes are not that funny, although Dovaleh does get off some zingers, in a style that veers perilously between Don Rickles insults and Lenny Bruce-like observations on both the militarism of settlers and left-wing pieties. One can’t help thinking this new work is Grossman’s attempt to get through, if not past, the demons of the past and find a freer, more extemporaneous way to express his anguish.

And the belief that watching the performance will somehow tell Dovaleh something he doesn’t already know echoes Ora and Avram’s conversations trying to ensure Ofer’s life is memorialized if he is lost in battle (something the earlier novel doesn’t resolve).īut the style couldn’t be more different. In a sense, the connection between the men mirrors that between Avram and Ilan, Ora’s ex-husband, in the earlier work. “I want you to look at see me, really see me, and then afterward tell me,” Greenstein tasks the surprised barrister, who didn’t protect him from youthful bullying. In part, Dovaleh does so by contacting his boyhood friend, retired District Court Judge Avishai Lazar, whom he invites to witness his act as a piece of self-discovery. Here, well translated by Jessica Cohen, Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa “Portnoy’s Complaint,’’ with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches as the hapless narrator tries to come to terms with the primal wound of his past. So his new book, for the most part an extended rant by Dovaleh - he’s no relation to Ali G, and seems more closely related to a metaphysically minded Rupert Pupkin, from “ The King of Comedy” - is an arresting, and for the most part, entertaining, departure. It was greeted with justifiable appreciation and respect.

As the book was being written, the author learned that his own son had died in the war with Lebanon. Grossman is most famous for his ambitious explorations of Israeli family life and politics in novels like 2011’s “To the End of the Land,’’ which recounted the journey of Ora, trying to ward off danger to her son, Ofer, who has re-upped for a military expedition against her wishes.

A horse walks into a bar by david grossman