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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
British comic author Jacobson unfolds his mordantly unsettling but hilarious ninth novel in retrospect. Cartoonist Max Glickman has built an uncertain career lampooning his own Judaism, while his relationships have been restricted to "women with diaereses or umlauts" (including ex-wives Chloë and Zoë). His introverted childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, grows up to commit a ghastly crime (also shiksa-related), but in their early adolescence, the two boys get together in an abandoned air raid shelter in 1950s Manchester to work on a comic-book history of Jewish suffering, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, completed years later by Max. The two meet again after decades, when Manny is released from prison and Max is hired by a TV production company headed by a Nazi sympathizer, in one of many caustic ironies, to develop a film treatment based on Manny's life. Paradoxically, it leads Max to real revelations about their pasts and their identities. The factual horror of the Holocaust is always close to the emotional core of this twisted tour de force—Max's fugue-like expletive-spewing first person reads like a British Zuckerman completely unbound—but Jacobson (The Making of Henry) tempers the profane with meditations on what it means to be British and Jewish. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Cartoonist Max Glickman's Jewishness, never far from mind, is his continuing subject. Raised in a nonobservant household outside Manchester, England, in the 1950s--where his atheist father sought to make Jewishness less of a burden and his mother played kalooki, a rummylike game favored by Jews--he was educated on the Holocaust by childhood friends. It was meek Manny Washinsky who first shared the Scourge of the Swastica, leading the two of them to develop the comic-book-history Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, later published by Max. And it was Manny who would murder his parents, gassing them in their beds, a deed that Max at midlife seeks to understand, initially in the interest of making a film. Jacobson's work has been described as seriously funny, and this fits that bill, ranging from theological debate (where was Elohim during Jewish persecutions?) to Max's accounts of his three marriages (to two shiksas and one Jewess, all with umlauts or diaereses in their names) to the descriptions of his cartoons. Jacobson's prose is pure pleasure--concise, markedly insightful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny--and his message, ultimately, is a heartbreaker. An exceptional novel. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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