I was a small child looking at slapstick pantomime, but I understood the covenant at the center of great comedic performance: You have to let the comedian pass on the pain. You laughed, but you had to feel sorry for him. Left out of the spotlight, he carried a sledgehammer and ran after the other clowns who wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I cannot wait to purchase my own copy of this beautiful book and come back to it several years from now with a new perspective.The earliest comedy I remember with any clarity was created by a famous tragic clown, a circus performer whose painted mouth was perpetually turned down in a frown. As the novel progresses, as the show progresses, we discover the history and connection between these two protagonists, an adolescent friendship culminating in a distinct personal trauma. After needing a few prompts to understand who precisely was calling him, Avishai, a retired and disgraced Supreme Court justice, agreed to come to the show and share with Dov what he saw. Splicing between time periods-one, the present the other, the comedian's childhood-this explores the relationship between Dovaleh and Avishai, hitting on themes of grief, loneliness, friendship, abandonment, humor, and fear.Īvishai received a phone call from Dov, requesting that he come see him. Set at a two-hour stand-up comedy show in a dive bar in Netanya, Israel, this book reminded me how much I love literary fiction. This phenomenal book, best read in one sitting, is inspiring me to read through the Man Booker International Prize winners and the rest of David Grossman's backlist.
While this is an important issue and it is important to be challenged by novels depicting different experiences from one's own, this book is from the perspective of an Israeli man in the army, without any perspective from Palestinians, so I don't see it as the most important or under-represented voice to be listening to on this topic.
I suspect that this book was so popular because it is about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But I didn't see myself starting to care about the protagonist to justify continuing. Halfway through it was only just starting to allude to what I gathered from other reviews was some traumatic event. I don't generally like when bigoted jokes are used as a vehicle for portraying the character telling them in a bad light- it is not particularly clever in my opinion and at the end of the day, the jokes are still being told at the expense of oppressed groups in order to make some point. I can get that that is the point but I don't get any fulfilment out of watching an accurate depiction of a train wreck, nor did I think there was sufficient insight or talent in how the author portrayed it to justify the experience. It was bad and full of cliche sexist and otherwise bigoted jokes. This is genuinely like watching bad stand-up.
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