Darkness and light collide in much-loved Israeli author David Grossman’s masterfully crafted A Horse Walks Into a Bar, the novel that just scooped the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
No laughing matter, this wildly intelligent parable has at its heart an at-first thoroughly unlikable stand-up comedian.
Dovaleh G has descended on a small club in an unremarkable Israeli town, Netanya, summoning two long-estranged childhood friends to witness his emotional collapse on stage.
Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, who splits the £50,000 ($84,000) prize with Grossman, there’s much more going on here, thanks to Grossman’s increasingly experimental pen.
Much to the consternation of Dovaleh’s old friends and an increasingly agitated audience, the comedian fires off racist jokes, abuses his audience and then relays the morbid story of when, as a teenager at an Israeli Army camp, he was driven home to bury a parent by a prolific joke-telling soldier.
Read the full article by Stephen A. Russell at The New Daily.