This book, written in Hebrew, won the Man Booker International Prize. It is an uncomfortably strange novel. There is tension in every word as the story slowly struggles to build. The very act of reading each page borders on a tedium that makes one squirm. The story takes place over the course of a single evening at a small town Israeli comedy club, with frequent flashbacks of snippets of the distant past, gradually revealed, which hint at a boding conclusion. The story is narrated by a retired judge, who has been invited to the club by the stand-up comic, a friend from his childhood whom he hasn’t spoken to in over fifty years. “In all my fleeting friendships with other boys there had been a sort of mutual anonymity that was comfortable and masculine, but with him…” The book progresses through the comedy routine, which skips from strange, to boring, to embarrassing, to laugh-out-loud funny before cycling back again. “Wait, you’re from the settlements? But then who’s left to beat up the Arabs? Just kidding! You know I’m kidding, right?” There are numerous jokes embedded in the narrative, yet the story is definitively more depressing than funny. It is unclear how much of this is Grossman’s intent, but he has clearly written the comic to be an awkwardly intriguing character who you cannot help but feel sorry and ashamed for at once. “That’s how this life turned out. Man plans; God fucks him.” There is an underlying mystery to the childhood friendship between the judge and the comic and so the reader continues through the painful tension of the stand up routine to find out just exactly how deep their bond really is.
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