Winner of The 2017 Man Booker International Prize This is a very difficult book to read. It is emotionally draining. It also has great emotional depth. A fifty-seven-year-old standup comedian gives a two-hour performance. On stage, he falls apart before our very eyes. Readers should be warned; this is not a book of laughs. We readers can of course simply close the book. The spectators could leave the show; it was just to walk out that door. Spectators entered the club looking for laughs, but

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, David Grossman, and the publisher, Vintage Digital, for this opportunity.This was my second read from the Man Booker International prize shortlist and, whilst I did not exactly 'get' this book, I can wholeheartedly see why it has garnered this acclaim.This book was... bizarre! The novel's concept is of a stand-up comedian delivering more than just the expected one-liners and, instead, giving his audience a

Update: Congrats to David Grossman!!! This book just won the Man Booker International Award!!! I was shaking at times reading David Grossman's new book -- my thoughts and emotions spinning. "A Horse Walks Into A Bar" ...."isn't just a book about Israel: it's a book about people and societies horribly malfunctioning". As I press the keyboard looking for what to write....I honestly just tremble inside. I can't seem to be able to separate reading David Grossman's book's any longer without feeling d...

A Night At the OperaBrilliant. David Grossman has created a new stand-up star with the acidic wit of Lenny Bruce and the pitiable cynicism of The Simpsons Krusty the Clown. I have seen performances by Jackie Mason and Rodney Dangerfield with dialogue that didn’t match Grossman’s Dov Greenstein. How many stage shows and clubs must Grossman have attended in order to understand the mysteries of technique, timing, and narrative line that are required to control an audience for hours? And on top of t...

I have never read anything like this novel! And this quote I am stealing from my son, who read it last week and said those exact words afterwards. In my naive yet curious approach to the book, I thought that I - with my 25 reading years ahead of my son - would surely be able to place and categorise it somehow. Well, I wasn't.Not even the fact that I had read another novel by the same author that same week my son read this one prepared me for what was to come.I feel like I have been sitting throu...

Update: a very worthy winner of the 2017 MBIPWhat sort of obligation do I have towards someone who I went to private tutoring sessions with forty-something years ago? I'm giving him five more minutes, on the dot, and if there isn't any kind of plot twist, I'm leaving. Book 12 from 13 of the Man Booker International longlist and I certainly saved one of the best till last.Israeli author David Grossman is perhaps best known in English for his To the End of the Land, translated by Jessica Cohen (a

For book reviews and recommendations go to https://booknationbyjen.wordpress.comA Horse Walks Into a Bar, the 2017 Man Booker International Prize Winner, is a stunning account of a middle aged, washed up comedian’s stand up show, but there is so much more. Taking place in the Israeli city of Netanya, Dovaleh Greenstein has invited a high school friend from military camp, Avishai Lavar, to watch the performance and then let him know what he sees…the person he really sees. In the audience, in addi...

A carousel of emotions and layers. Deep, as personal as political, seductive while often uneasy. Very emotional life story wrapped in 2 hours performance of Israeli standup comedian... Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d627e...

Winner of the Man Booker International PrizeUpdate: I listened to an interesting conversation with David Grossman about his inspiration for the book, the translation, stories and Israel. To be listened after you read the novel because it contains spoilers. The link: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/in...I left it for Today to write my review for A Horse Walks into a Bar because I was sure it will be the winner although it was my least favorite of the 4 shortlisted novels that I read. Moreover,...

Here it is now – a shared flicker that no one but the two of us, I hope, can detect. You came, his look says. Look what time has done to us, here I am before you, show me no mercy. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about this book, to be honest. Like most Booker Prize winners, it is undoubtedly very clever, but can I say I actually enjoyed reading it? Not really.There have been a number of reviews and comments saying "I don't really like stand-up comedy, but..." or "I do like stand-up comedy so...

Despite the title of this book, it is not going to make you laugh. It is a compulsive and harrowing read. It is about Jewish history, the dysfunctional nation of Israel and its people, where the political is heartbreakingly personal. The narrative covers two hours of a middle aged stand up comic's routine, albeit an unusual one where Dovaleh Greenstein spews forth the horrors that have comprised his life. It is set in a club in Netanya, with a broad section of Israeli society watching him as he

I am not a big fan of stand-up comedy. Even though there are many funny moments in such performances, I find most of the jokes crass and overtly sexual - and the comedian is in such a tizzy most of the time to get the audience to laugh, he seems to work at being funny; which, IMO, makes it even more unfunny. The only thing missing is the laugh track.But consider for a moment the comedian, the guy behind the clown's mask. He is taxed with an unenviable task - he must laugh, no matter what. As the...

Everyone knows that successful stand up routines are laughs at the expense of grief, or embarrassment, or pain of some kind. The laughing picks a sore and in many cases, starts the healing. The novel-length comedy routine given by Dovaleh Greenstein one night in a worn-down beach town is unique. The night of the performance is his birthday. He will be fifty-seven. He will give a one-of-a-kind, career-ending show that looks at his life, his heritage, and one particular loss that shaped him as a y...

"A man walks into a bar. Ouch!" (Credit Jason Fowles 1998)“A duck walks into a bar, orders a drink, and tells the bartender, put it on my bill”—Anonymous, though probably somebody in my family on a holiday weekend would take credit for inventing it.I finished listening to A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, which I think—if done well, and it is, by Joe Barrett in the flat, gruff noir style he also brings to reading Richard Stark and Lawrence Block, among others—is the best way to experie...

The Last Stand-UpSo this comedian walks into a club. It's Netanya, Israel, not the audience he would have chosen, but hey, a gig's a gig. So he insults them a little, flatters them a little, tells a few one-liners, and soon they are eating out of his hand. Doveleh G's been doing this for 40 years; he knows his job. So does veteran Israeli author David Grossman who, aided by his splendid translator Jessica Cohen, captures the scene perfectly. Not just the jokes and routines, but the roller-coaste...

This book won this year's Man Booker International Prize, which in itself created very high expectations, and for me it never came close to fulfilling them. The central portrait of a stand-up comedian Doveleh Greenstein, giving a final performance in which he abandons jokes for a cathartic bout of self-analysis in which he gives a detailed account of a traumatic and pivotal day in his childhood, is undoubtedly a powerful one, though the idea of a tortured comedian is nothing new. Where I struggl...

3.5 starsI approached this one with some trepidation. I don't like stand up comedy. My husband says I have no sense of humor, that's not really it, I don't find things funny that are at other people's expense which is generally the basis for comedy routines/jokes. I chose to read this because it is short-listed for the Man-Booker International prize and also because I really enjoyed Grossman's To the End of the Land.The entire books takes place over the course of a couple of hours at a rundown b...

Dovaleh is the kind of comedian I would never go to see: he is vulgar and offensive and his jokes are often bad. But, by the end of this book I was almost in tears alongside him. It's that kind of book. It takes you on a journey where you learn to care about a person you would not normally have anything to do with. And it is a mark of the power of the writing here that I found myself coming to care about a fictional, unpleasant person!Last year's Man Booker winner was criticised by some because

Edit on 15/6/2017 - Why there is so much torture in the world. This book has won Booker International 2017 ... Seriously ? Now I have some serious doubts on Booker.----------- My Review -----------------------A story of 10 inch, stretched till the length of 10 kilometers. The bush has beaten at such level that even the pulp has been reduced to invisible."Man plans, god fucks him."Similarly I would say 'expectation plans and reality fucks it."A lot of blending thoughts, this time, didn't work for...

I don’t often read blurbs of books, particularly if the book is award-winning or very popular. I like going into a story blindly and see where it takes me. I don’t know what I expected from this book, but it certainly wasn’t this. A Horse Walks into a Bar gets its name from a joke and describes two hours of a stand-up comedy show. And that’s where the relation between humor and this book ends. The protagonist, Dovaleh G, is a stand-up comedian at the end of his career. The show starts with some