[04/10/18] Tentang A Horse Walks Into a Bar Karya David Grossman

 

**WINNER
OF THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE**

The award-winning and internationally
acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short
novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one
evening’s performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs
flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape–one that will alter
the lives of many of those in attendance.

In a little dive in a small Israeli
city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of
stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov
knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny
kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as
it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of
memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful
flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and
his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative
son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth–where Lazar witnessed
what would become the central event of Dov’s childhood–Dov describes the
indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian’s story of
loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront
life’s capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers
a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in
questionable taste included).