THE JOKE’S ON YOU

Ahorse walks into a bar, begins an old Jewish joke. The barman then turns to it and says, ‘Why the long face?’

In Israeli writer David Grossman’s Man Booker Prizewinning A Horse Walks Into a

Bar, the ‘long face’ belongs to the protagonist, Dov Greenstein, a 57-year-old stand-up comic in a basement club at Netanya, a coastal town near the West Bank. One evening, he proclaims he is planning to enact the ‘mother of all shows’.

In the audience is Avishai Lazar, Dov’s childhood friend and the narrator of the book. A former judge who retired due to his inability to control his anger, Lazar has been persuaded by his old friend to turn up at this performance, even though they haven’t met in 40 years. ‘I want you to see me, really see me,’ Dov tells Avishai. And then to tell him what he saw. Also in the crowd is Azulai—a tiny ‘medium’ with a speech defect—whom Dov had protected from abuse when they were neighbours. Now, Dov is irreverent and offensive, and his jokes have become sexist and misogynistic.

As the evening progresses, the show turns into an autobiographical narrative in which a disillusioned Dov reveals horrifying details about his past—his violent father and his helpless mother who worked for the Israeli military industry. Avishai remembers Dov as a perpetual victim of bullies at an army camp that the two of them attended as children, recalling an incident in which Dov walked on his hands to escape a beating while Avishai stayed a silent spectator. The author hints at something more than an ordinary friendship between the two, but leaves the reader guessing. The whole novel takes place over a period of two hours, with long digressions into Israeli history and politics, woven into the personal life of a broken man.

According to Nick Barley, chair of the 2017 judging panel, ‘… every sentence counts, every word matters in this supreme example of the writer’s craft.’ It is slightly difficult to agree. Jokes that tickle Dov’s audience seem either hackneyed or incomprehensible, especially to a reader unfamiliar with the context. The language and expressions may be simple but don’t qualify as awesome. Of course, translation has its challenges—but these factors do influence the overall appeal of the book.

AVISHAI REMEMBERS DOV AS A PERPETUAL VICTIM OF BULLIES