Hmm, Not as Funny as I expected.
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In person Jacobson is very funny. On the page he is not as good. This is long, diffcult and interesting read but don't expect laugh out loud moments.
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HITTING NEW HEIGHTS
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Quite simply, one of the best novels written about Jews and their perpetual challenge of being the chosen ones. Jacobson has put together a book of great breadth and depth - disappointing for some of his fans, no doubt, who are used to something more superficial - which touches on so many aspects of Jewish life and the Jews' relationships with the rest of the world. The sparkling humour is still there and the narrator is characteristically flawed, but Jacobson goes much deeper than ever before and this book deserves all the praise it has received. Shame on those reviewers here who could not finish it - you have missed something truly special.
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Kalooki Nights
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Kalooki Nights by the English novelist Howard Jacobson tells a story of an English Jewish community in Manchester, England in the years following WW II. The chief protagonist is the narrator, Max Glickman, a cartoonist who has had three wives, two non-Jewish and anti-semitic, and one Jewish, who also endeavors to loosen Judaism's hold on Max. Max's father was an aspiring boxer who became an atheist and tries to give both Max and his other child, his daughter Shani, a secular life. Shani marries a non-Jewish man in what proves to be a successful relationship. Max's mother is an inveterate player of a card game called Kalooki, with a group of other Jewish women.
The book recounts Max's relationship with his childhood friend Manny Washinsky. Unlike Max, Manny was raised in an orthodox household. Manny teaches Max of the horrors of the Holocaust. When Max's older brother becomes romantically involved with a non-Jewish woman and the parents do everything in their power to terminate the relationship, Max ultimately gasses them to death in their bed and spends many years in prision. Years later Max and Manny meet again, when an anti-semitic television producer hires Max to do research on a story about Manny.
In many ways, this book is a cross between "Portnoy's Complaint" and other early books by Philip Roth and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", the story of two American Jewish cartoonists, by Michael Chabon. The book has as some of its themes the tension between secularism and traditional religiosity as options for modern Jews, the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish life and belief, and the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, particularly as the relationships involve sexuality and intimacy.
The book is funny in many places and insightful in some. But it is told in a blustery, wandering, and diffuse style which make it difficult to follow. The language is wordy, profane, and satirical -- probably in an attempt to create some artistic distance between the author and the events which he describes -- but much of the book I found painful. The characters, Jewish and non-Jewish, are full of bigotry for each other and hatred for themselves. Sexual themes play a large role in the book, as the Jewish men are embittered towards Jewish women -- thinking that the women will not become involved in a sexual relationship with them -- and the non-Jewish women are drawn to what they think they perceive of Jewish men. This is a story that has been told before, and it is drummed in unmercifully in this novel.
Some of this story has a context broader than the ambiguous situation that, for the author, many Jewish people find themselves in or create for themselves. The author deals implicitly with the need of people to find spirituality for themselves without the extremes of total secularism on the one hand on routinized fundamenalism or othodoxy on the other hand. But the self-pitying, solipsistic outlook of most of the characters of the book, together with its windy, unorganized character, make this novel a chore to read and largely unsuccessful.
Robin Friedman
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Disappointing...and far too long
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Other reviewers of the book appear to have had a similar reaction to mine--this book is just too long. Like Zadie Smith's rambling and unfocused On Beauty, Kalooki Nights is another example of an author in desperate need of an editor. The book might have been far more interesting if 200 or so pages were knocked off it. There is always a lovely edge of anger and frustration in Jacobson's characters, but for some reason Maxie's self-loathing is less interesting than previous Jacobson creations and his expressions of it are so repetitive that the edge is worn off long before you get to the end of the book. Manny's story on the surface is an intriguing and potentially offensive one, but it somehow fails to be as subversive as one would assume it to be. Jonathan Safran Foer's comparison of Jacobson to Phillip Roth on the back cover is ridiculous: Roth's recent work seethes and rages with a frightening intensity, whilst his earlier work is sharply self-loathing and precise (i.e not 500 pages). I always have thought of Jacobson as a very different sort of writer--his characters express intense frustrations in a more subtly comic way than in great intense bursts. I think Kalooki Nights was meant to be a "big" book in terms of its subject matter, but in some ways it is only a big book in terms of the number of pages.
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Over long and rather self defeating
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Kalooki Nights is a loosely biographical story of Maxie Glickman, a post-war Mancunian Jew.
The central theme seems to centre around victimhood and minority identity when the witchhunt moves elsewhere. Maxie and his schoolfriends soon learn deep anger at the treatment of the Jews in the war and exert enormous energy hating the war criminals. To justify their anger at events they never witnessed, they hunt for antisemitism in all around them. When they don't succeed, they seem to annoy others in order to provike reactions that can be seen as anti-semitism. This is exemplified in Maxies choice of wives and girlfriends, most of whom are anodyne at best but provoked into reaction against Maxie's constant self-pity and reference back to Jewsih themes. There is an amusing contrast on display in the form of Maxie's sister's man - an Irishman (sorry, the name escapes me), who is very eager to learn Jewish ways and frustrated when he never quite succeeds.
This is an interesting premise - how do members of an oppressed minority react when the oppression stops. Do members integrate with the whole, as some characters do; or do they continue to act the role of the victim, becoming increasingly frustrated as sympathy evaporates? But the premise might have been brought to denouement in half the number of pages. Although Kalooki Nights did have moments of humour in the early encounters, it became repetitive and dull. Not even the intrigue about Maxie's friend Manny (who had gassed his parents) was enough to sustain interest. I did read on to the bitter end (and there was much bitterness to be got through in the process), but I'm not sure it repaid the effort.
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