Ranked a Top 25 Canadian Book Blog
Twitter: @DCYakabuski
Facebook: Doreen Yakabuski
Instagram: doreenyakabuski
Threads: doreenyakabuski

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

2017 Man Booker International Prize Winner

The winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize has been announced:  A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman (Israel) – translated by Jessica Cohen.

This short novel is about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening’s performance.  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.

The Man Booker International Prize is given to a book in English translation, with a £50,000 prize for the winning title, to be shared equally between author and translator.  Its aim is to encourage more publishing and reading of quality works in translation.

No comments:

Post a Comment