Thursday 14 June 2018

"A Horse Walks into a Bar" by David Grossman

A retired judge, grieving the loss of his wife, watches a stand-up comic, once a childhood friend, perform a routine in a cabaret bar in Israel. As the evening progresses the stand-up turns the act into a confessional. One by one the audience leave as the jokes run dry and the comic becomes serious.

This book, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, has a single scene (the cabaret bar); it starts when the comic enters on stage and it ends when he finishes his routine. It is narrated by the judge who observes the whole thing unfold. 

To what extent does the judge's bereavement foreshadow the climax of the story? “I saw for real that he wasn't worth anything without her, and that all his power in life came from her being with him. He turned into half a human in that one instant.” (p 193)

Questions:
What's it all about?
Is it actually about writing? “I quickly discovered that exaggerations were warmly welcomed: no pin pricks would deflate my hot-air balloons, and it turned out that I could and should tell each story over and over again with embellishment and plot twists, some that were real and others that could have been.” (p 39) Is Grossman reflecting on the art of the storyteller?

Is it about the holocaust? There are several key metaphors here. Firstly, the crime that the Judge commits in the army camp is one of witnessing something bad happening and failing to do anything about it, perhaps from fear. It could be argued that this alludes to the way people who knew about the death camps did nothing to stop the crimes being committed there. This crime, of course, takes place in an army camp, and could equally allude to those who witness crimes committed against the Palestinians (or anyone weaker than you) and do nothing. Another metaphor is that of the choice which the comic feels he made, as a lad, which brings to mind the selection at the camps into those who would live and those who would die. A third metaphor could be found in the way that the comic keeps a tally of those who walk out of the show.

Is it about Israel? The comic with his puny scarred body could represent the Israeli nation. The small Medium keeps telling him that he was a good boy when he was young; perhaps he is no longer. He was bullied when he was small; his aggressive stand-up routine might symbolise the nation's way of standing up to the bigger nations that surround it. And the way that the show lurches into self-destruction might also reflect on the writer's perception of Israeli history.

Why the three characters? The protagonist is the stand-up comedian. The narrator is the retired Judge. Having a narrator is important, I think, because it allows Grossman to observe the reactions to the comedian and because it allows us not to know where the comedian is going. Their childhood friendship, during which the Judge betrayed the Comic, adds an important note of tension because, as the Comic tells his long story, we are unsure whether he will reveal what the Judge did. The third character, the small Medium who regularly defends the Comic, saying what a nice boy he used to be, is more difficult to understand in terms of her role within the story.

How is the plot structured? It seems a rambling account in which the Comic starts by telling jokes before embarking on the long confessional story of his childhood. But is there a skeleton? In film writing scriptwriters are exhorted to use a three act structure (I think of this as a four act structure because the middle act of the three is twice as long as the others and often divided into two parts). To ascertain whether this book was analysable in terms of a four act structure I looked at what happened around pages 50, 100, and 150:

  • Around page fifty the small Medium contributes, revealing that she knew the Comic when he was young telling the audience that he was a nice boy who walked on his hands. 
  • Around page 100 the Comic starts telling the audience about his experience in an army training camp and the Judge believes that this is where he will be outed as a betrayer.
  • Around page 150 the driver Jokerman has a realisation and starts to treat his passenger as a person.

I'm not sure if these are the major turning points. I suspect that the most important moment is about page 103 when we start to realise what the Comic's long story might be about.





Great moments:
  • ‘But I have seen you before’, I reminded him. ‘It's been years’, he said immediately. ‘I'm not me, you're not you’.” (p 63)
  • You were such medicine for me, such medicine for the dry bachelorhood that had closed in on me ... and for all the antibodies to life that had built up in my blood through all the years without you” (p 69)
  • Being. ... what an amazing, subversive idea.” (p 72)
  • A little boy trapped between the table and the wall as his father lashes him with a belt.” (p 79)
  • I’ve long ago forgotten if it's my dignity I've lost or my shame.” (p 133)
  • Be nice ... Remember that every person only lives for a short time, and you have to make that time pleasant.” (p 138)

A tour de force. One of the few books liked by all the members of my book group. June 2018; 198 pages


This review was written by

the author of Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God



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