3 Novels by Howard Jacobson
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Overview: Born in Manchester, England in 1942, novelist and broadcaster Howard Jacobson was educated at Cambridge University. He lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College.
Genre: Literary Fiction > Humor
The Mighty Walzer (1999)
Howard Jacobson has been described as "one of the funniest writers alive", his fiction a masterpiece of comedy. "At its best", writes Mary Loudon, "it simply tears you apart." Following the success of No More Mr Nice Guy in 1998–Jacobson’s foul and funny rendition of the sex war–The Mighty Walzer moves into the strange, and passionate, world of ping pong to tell the life of one Oliver Walzer. "Grandiosity was in the family," Oliver announces at the very beginning of his account of a childhood in Manchester in the 1950s. "On my father’s side. Normally, when I speak of "the family" I seem to mean my father’s side. Make what you like of that." It’s a challenge which runs throughout the book. We can make what we like of this "history of embarrassments" and the family–"from some sucking bog outside Proskurov"–which supports it.
"One disillusionment at a time" is the principle behind Jacobson’s telling of a youth suspended between ping pong and masturbation, mortification and omnipotence, anti- Semitism and the Akiva gang. At the Akiva club, Walzer comes into his own: he’s a natural, with the makings of a "star" (even if he is stoned by the "prefab boys" on his way there). At home, he’s caught between the flamboyance of his market-trader father–the "swag", and swagger, he wants to pass on to his son–and his mother’s famous "reserve". Balancing the split legacy–win or lose? laugh or cry? put up or shut up?–is part of the pain, and pleasure, of the book. No surprise, perhaps, that Walzer is unwilling to make a clear distinction between the two. When it comes to sex and friendship, family and history, life and ping pong, The Mighty Walzer is a brilliant story of one man’s journey to the realm of "pain fun": the pleasure of a life spent losing and learning what you can ask for. –Vicky Lebeau
Kalooki Nights (2006)
Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother’s glamorous card evenings to look forward to, and photographs of his father’s favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, and the impossibility of forgetting. Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it’s a life. Or it seems a life until Max’s long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, Max is drawn into Manny’s family history – above all his brother’s tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.
The Act of Love (2008)
Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. He runs one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in London and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn’t always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But an event occurs while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida that changes all that. At a stroke he goes from dreading the thought of someone else’s hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. From now on he is jealousy’s slave and will know no peace until his wife betrays him, and then betrays him again. But how can it be called betrayal if it is what he wants? Enter Marius into Marisa’s affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man.
This is a story about agony-addiction; but it is also about the nature of desire itself, the exquisiteness of loss, and the universality of the impulse – whether a jealous husband’s or an avid reader’s – to play the voyeur, to probe and question, to want to know, day after day, page after page, who is doing what to whom and what will happen next. Shocking, unashamedly perverse, mordantly funny, and at the last heartbreaking, "The Act of Love" tackles one of the last taboos of the erotic life. No husband who reads this novel will ever feel the same about his wife again. And no wife will be sure she really knows her husband.
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