A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 5000 unique visitors each month. So far 213 book reviews have been published.
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 Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question is another Booker long-list selection, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t make the short-list, although my guess is that it won’t actually win the prize.
Howard Jacobson writes with sophistication and verve. I often found myself pausing over a sentence to take in the meaning, double, or triple sometimes, for Jacobson’s use of language is always inventive and occasionally startling.
The story centres on Julian Treslove, a former radio producer whose career has failed to rise as it should have, mainly because of his lack of focus on the task in hand and a degree of self-doubt which robs him of the certainty he needs to succeed.
Treslove has two close friends, Sam Finkler, a television producer and Jewish philosopher and the former teacher of Sam and Julian, Libor Sevcik, an elderly widower, also Jewish, who in some ways acts as a mentor to the two men.
One day, while walking near Broadcasting House Treslove is mugged and all his valuables are stolen. Treslove is mortified to realise that his assailant is a woman. And to complicate matters, although the words she uttered at the time of the robbery are indistinct, on further reflection, Treslove comes to believe that they were the words, “You Jew!”.
Continue reading Review: The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson
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 I was drawn to Rhyming Life and Death when I read on the cover that it reflects on “writing, reading and the elusive chimera of literary posterity” . I have a category of book on this blog entitled “books about books”, and as an avid reader, a new addition to it is a reward in itself.
Amos Oz is renowned in Israel for his courageous political stance as a secular social-democrat, having lived on a Kibbutz for thirty years and being a leading voice in the peace movement. He has won numerous literary awards as listed in his Wikipedia entry.
In his latest novel Rhyming Life and Death, Oz addresses the nature of writing fiction by letting his readers in on the internal reflections of the “Author”, a fictional writer, who is invited to attend a public reading of his work in Tel Aviv. During the following eight hours we read of his preparation for the reading, the event itself and then his wanderings around the city through the night-time.
The Author anticipates the questions he is likely to be asked by the audience after the reading -
- Why do you write?
- Why do you write the way you do?
- Are you trying to influence your readers and if so how?
- Do you constantly cross out and correct or do you write straight out of your head?
- What is it like to be a famous writer?
- Do you write with a pen or a computer?
. . . and so on, and on, and on. The Author sits in a café down the road from the literary centre to try to prepare his answers to these questions, but his thoughts are taken up by the waitress, with her “shapely, attractive legs”. He steals a look at her face, and finds it pleasant, sunny, with her hair tied back with a red rubber band. While he is waiting for his omelette and salad he begins to imagine her life, giving her the name “Ricky” as he writes her personal history in his head. We, the readers, are drawn into the creative process, as “Ricky” takes form before our eyes (this is perhaps a little like looking into a mirror placed in front of another mirror – the fictional “Author” creates a fictional personal for the twice-fictional “Ricky”).
Continue reading Review Rhyming Life and Death – Amos Oz
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 The English translation of Kahn and Englemann was published this year by the Canadian publisher Biblioasis, just three days after its author Hans Eichner died at the age of 87. Eichner, an Austrian Jew, was well-placed to write this story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary as they made their way through the trials of the last century, for much of the book echoes his own family and personal history.
In the midst of the story is of course the Holocaust, but it features more as an ironic exit room for many of the Kahns and Engelmann’s, for Eichner does not dwell on the horrors, but reports that such and such “turned his face to the wall and starved to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp” – after all, the horrors are well known, and perhaps Eichner realised that he had little to add to those more detailed accounts from other authors. However, more on this towards the end of this review.
The story begins in Tapolca, near Lake Balaton in Hungary, where the Kahn’s are wealthy estate owners. However, the story begins with the narrator’s grandmother, Sidonie, at the age of 17 deciding to marry a poor shoe-maker. Nobody can persuade her otherwise, and she even escapes from virtual house-arrest to go to the boy she has chosen for herself, before long returning home expecting a baby.
Sidonie is a resourceful girl and much to her parents’ disgust, starts selling vegetables from a market stall. She is an ambitious young woman and gets her way in everything she sets her heart on, and soon the young family are loading all their belongings onto a cart and making a terribly arduous journey to Vienna. Continue reading Review: Kahn and Englemann – Hans Eichner
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This novel, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, lays the foundation for Zimler’s magnificent Zarco series, which charts the fortunes of the descendants of Zerkiah Zarco over several centuries. It is suprising that some readers have failed to see that this is a work of fiction – Zimler likes to mix up fact and fiction [...]
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