A Horse Walks into a Bar

This is almost two hundred pages of repetitive stand up boring comic chatter. . Like the audience that finally walks out I wish I had closed the book much earlier. A good concept and maybe a good short story. Certainly not a long endless novel.

This book reminded me of the vagina monologues, only about inner demons instead of vaginas. The main character tells the story of his mother's death and his relationship with his father. The main character's relationships with the other characters is underdeveloped. I was hoping that the end justified the dragging middle, I do not think it was worth it. I wished I had walked out earlier with the other patrons.

I read for enjoyment, and I did not enjoy reading this book. It is dreary and repetitive. Its main character is an extremely not funny stand up comedian, a masochist, depressed and depressing. The other character is mourning for his dead wife. The telling of the comedian's life story suddenly comes to an end when he is 14 years old, which was over 40 years from the novel's "now".
I am unable to understand what the judges saw in that book that made them give it first prize.

The writing was interesting and clever, but it was not an easy read. I found myself not wanting to read much at one sitting. It was difficult to follow, only to be made more so by infrequent reading.

I realize this book was awarded a Booker prize but the depth of anguish of the stand up comedian and the horror of his self abuse was more than I could bear given the state of all that is currently happening in America.

Grossman is probably a brilliant writer, but slogging through this was difficult. And not much fun, either. Hard to tell who was talking, who was n't. I really don't think reading has to be this difficult. (reference ULYSSES, in which I never got past the first 30 pages).

I thought something would happen or come together or fall into place, or something. It never did, or, maybe I simply missed it. Garry Schtiengart, an author I like, gave it a great review, so I persevered. It was a mistake.

Dovaleh Greenstein is 57 years old and a standup comic. And he steps on stage to give a performance of a lifetime, at a club in a small industrial-type town in Israel. It will be a performance no one expects, especially not the man Dovaleh has invited, almost begged to attend, a man he hasn’t seen in more than 40 years, when they were both young teens.

He takes the stage. He tells jokes. He tells stories. He insults the audience. He insults individual members of the audience. He goes off on wild tangents. If you’re in the audience, you might think your entertainment has been hijacked. If you’re the reader of “A Horse Walks into a Bar” by David Grossman (translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen), you wonder if you’re going to be able to stand the comedy and the anger and the almost-manic monologues that seem to go on and on.

But, like the audience, you hang in there, the audience perhaps because it likes to be insulted, as long as it’s funny and entertaining (look, this guy even makes jokes about the Holocaust). The reader plods ahead, knowing that this novel won the 2017 Man Booker International Award and there must be a reason or reasons why it did, and knowing that Grossman has published a wide array of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction works.

Members of the audience begin to leave. Some stay. Some readers may quit. But if you continue, you begin to understand what is happening in this story, and what a truly extraordinary story it is. It’s going to smack you upside the head.

The pivotal player is not the man on the stage. No, that role belongs to the man invited to attend, Avishai Lazar, a retired judge. Still grieving the loss of his wife, he can’t quite believe he agreed to come. Several times he almost walks out. After all, he barely knew Dovaleh. And the last time he had seen him was when they were 13 and attending an Israeli Army camp for young people. Dovaleh had had to leave early, and no one, including Avishai, knew why. And that will become the point on which the story hinges.

You might, like I did, spend the first 40 to 50 pages telling yourself there must be something better to read, that you don’t really see where this story is going, and you’re getting put off by the constant stream of anger and insults, no matter how many jokes are mixed in. But then something happens, there is a shift that begins subtly and then builds, and you discover you’re captivated. Because it happens on stage, Grossman has written what is strikingly like a play, a play that gradually becomes mesmerizing.

“A Horse Walks into a Bar” will unlike anything you’ve read before. And if you persist, you will understand why it won the Man Booker award.

It takes a little while before we realize that this story is told by a narrator, Avishai Lazar, who had taken early retirement (we find out later why) from being a Judge from an Israeli District Court. He was rung up one day by one Dov Goldstein, with whom he had had a close friendship at school some forty years earlier and who asks him to attend a show in Netanya, in which Goldstein is performing as a stand-up comic: he wants from him a judgment on his show. Something, the suggestion of some painful memory, makes Lazar feel uneasy and even hostile, but he eventually agrees. Only after he has agreed does the suppressed memory surface – a shaming incident when they were both together at a military training camp near Eilat for high school kids. He had not seen Goldstein since then.

The story, interrupted from time to time by Lazar’s memories and by his observations of Goldstein’s superb acting, is of the show that evening. There are no chapter breaks in the 210 pages of the book.
Goldstein looks skeletal, and at one point Lazar realizes that he appears fatally sick. From the start, Goldstein’s jokes are aggressive to the members of the audience, but are met with laughter and applause. Then he begins to make jokes about antisemitism and even about the Holocaust, and the audience begins to feel uncomfortable.

Then Goldstein launches into a long, circuitous and sad story of his childhood, only occasionally interrupted by jokes: of his weird behaviour as a child, which his mother loved but his father savagely beat out of him; of how he then had no friends except for a girl (now a small woman in the audience) and Lazar. He comes to the time when, at the age of fourteen, he was at the training camp, but without mentioning the incident of which Lazar was so ashamed. Goldstein’s time at the camp ends when he is summoned to attend a funeral in Jerusalem. No one tells him whose funeral, and he is afraid to ask. At enormous length and with all sorts of detours of jokes and of thoughts and memories about his father and his mother that pass through his mind, Goldstein now tells the story of being driven north in an army truck. The journey never seems to come to an end, and eventually the audience loses patience, and more and more of them leave. His tale ends at the cemetery. He now knows whose funeral it is. He also has a sense of deep self-loathing which has remained with him for the rest of his life. At the very end, only Goldstein and Lazar are left in the room.

There is much that is enigmatic in the novel. Goldstein himself is a puzzle to me: I can understand why he drags out the story for so long, unwilling to reach the bitter end; but what drives him into telling it to this audience? On what is Goldstein’s self-loathing based? Why had he wanted a judgment of his performance by Lazar? What exactly was that judgment? What is the significance of the small woman in the audience, the last to leave before Goldstein and Lazar are left alone? When he segued from telling jokes to telling his story, I became more involved; but, like most members of the audience, I began to weary when he spun it out to such excessive length.

We are also left with questions about Lazar: he is a grieving widower, but we are told little about his wife Tamara and nothing about her death. All we know is that she had a warm heart and had chided Lazar for his apparently distant and uninvolved character.

So, with so much left unexplained, I am surprised that the book won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

Some award winners disappoint, others delight or grip. This one is somewhere halfways.
A comedian in a provincial theater in Israel. We follow his show. The audience laughs partly at his physical act, which we can't see, but find well described. His words don't strike the reader as very funny, apart from a few jokes. His jokes are often ad personam and sometimes embarrassing. He involves the audience. Some of the jokes are so black, midnight can't compete. Dr. Mengele was our family doctor. Oh man.

A parallel narration, this one in first person by a man in the audience, gives us background. How the comedian invited the man to come to the show. How the two men, both approaching 60, were friends as kids for a while. How the narrator recalls his share of guilt, conveniently forgotten for 40 years.

We find out, this isn't mainly about the Holocaust, but more about bullying and heartlessness.

Surprisingly, the book creates substantial suspense by a mystery: what kind of awful secret will the 'comedian' reveal? He is artfully working up to something unpleasant. The audience would much rather be amused.
The story's finale was a bit of a let down for me. Of course I will not tell you what it is, but it didn't rock my boat. The audience, by the way, started leaving before the end.
And don't expect to get to know the ending of the horse in the bar story.

Stick with it, would be my first observation. It may take a while for you to be drawn into this, and to be fair Grossman plays his cards close to his chest. The majority of the book takes place on stage with Dov and his stand-up comedy routine.
Dov bares his emotions and soul to the audience. He pays particular attention to his old acquaintance Avi, after extending a personal invitation to him. Why comedy? Well, that becomes self explanatory when Dov tells everyone what happens to his parents.
Avishai is both observer and narrator, through past and present. I think one of the most important questions is what role he plays in the story. Why does Dovaleh want him there? What will his presence change? Does Dov expect something from Avishai?
I do believe Dov wants Avi to comprehend what he did and how he treated Dov all those years ago. There is a moment during the comedy routine or rather the life monologue where Avi is once again given the choice between looking away or intervening. This decision may be the beginning of a healing process, then again perhaps it is just late justice.
Grossman reminds me of Roald Dahl in a sense that his writing reflects his grief. You can feel the pain of losing his son in his words. Even after a decade he still seems to be searching for the why of it all. This is also a theme within this particular story. Why Dov? What is the point of our existence? Why one person and not the other? Perhaps most importantly why so many of us look the other way when someone is in need or just needs some support.
This is an unusual read, one I can imagine well as a short film. It is a confession of sorts, the type that needs absolution or maybe Dov is seeking it for others. A Horse Walks into a Bar is a complex conversation full of self flagellation in the form of jokes.
*I received a free copy of this book courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.*

Somewhere along the line, I saw that this book won the Man Booker International Prize this year and put it on my “to read” list on Overdrive. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, other than perhaps a little bit of comedy, considering the title is a basic setup for a joke’s punchline. In that sense, the book delivered on that premise by being about a stand-up comedian in a nightclub giving his routine to the audience. I did not expect, however, the deeper subtext about the character and his relation to the narrator. It’s in this subtext where we find the meat of this story.

It has often been said that “Sometimes all you can do is laugh to keep yourself from crying.” A Horse Walks into a Bar epitomizes this statement by blending serious subjects like cancer, death, and the Holocaust with a smattering of jokes, physical comedy, and anecdotal monologues. It’s in this contrast where we find how uncomfortable society is when dealing with the difficult subjects of life. I know I usually use comedy to cope with challenging situations, often in an inappropriate accommodation to the dour mood. In the end, we’d rather not address these facts of life because they don’t bring any joy into the world.

Partly due to a lack of explanation, as well as a somewhat jolting and meandering storytelling method, the plot of this book felt a little light, if not downright confusing. I’m sure if I had paid more attention to the words spoken by the ill comedian (who himself was kind of weird) I would have pulled more out of it and understood it better. Unfortunately, my mind always clings to the jokes, of which there a few good ones, and tends to ignore anything else that might be significant.

A bit uncomfortable, but poignant nonetheless, I give A Horse Walks into a Bar 3.5 stars out of 5.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar, David Grossman, author; Joe Barrett, narrator, Jessica Cohen, translator
The book is well written, but I don’t think it will be universally enjoyed. I believe it is for a narrow audience that is familiar with Jewish humor and its universal ideas about guilt and shame. A stand-up comedian in his mid fifties, Dov Greenstein, is performing in a small nightclub that seems a bit second rate, in Netanya, Israel. He has invited a former school chum, a judge, to attend his performance as a special favor. He has not seen Ashivai Lazar for years, but he has followed his career. Dov has asked Ashivai to come to his performance and tell him honestly how he perceives him. In the audience, possibly by chance, there is also a woman who was a neighbor of his from his childhood. She is now a manicurist and a medium. He calls her Pitz. Each of these three characters has a defining characteristic which is important to the story. How does each of them “see” Dovela? How do they see themselves?
I did not find the story funny, although it features Dov’s entire stand up routine of the night. Interspersed between jokes Dovela relates’s, the background of his life. The two characters who knew him are privy to some of his memories and are affected by them, but the audience experiences frustration when the jokes stop and the monologue grows serious. Some get up and leave, some become drawn to his story. Readers will experience the same ups and downs. All will be forced to think about how things are perceived and how that perception shapes their lives and the lives of others.
This odd little book examines how we all see each other and ourselves. It examines how that perception effects how we all turn out. The humor is often dark and inappropriate. Dr. Mengele, “the angel of death” from the Holocaust Concentration Camp, Aushwitz, is referred to as his family doctor. His mother was a survivor who did not survive wholly well. It is intimated that she is emotionally unstable. Dov walked on his hands to escape from reality and to protect his mother from the stares of others. It drew attention away from her making him the subject of ridicule, instead. It offered him a way to escape from his life, as well. Upside down, he was smiling, not frowning. His father was a brute who physically abused him.
Dov’s jokes and language are crude, even vulgar. His physical description is unpleasant. His performance concerns subjects we don’t usually consider funny. He jokes about cancer, the Holocaust, death, sex and a horse that walks into a bar, which is a joke begun by a driver who is taking him to the funeral of someone who has not yet been identified to him, but he knows there has been some kind of a tragedy he will have to experience against his will.
All three of the people that the story focuses on have had difficulties because of how people saw them, without really seeing them. They made people uncomfortable. Was this performance meant to expose the shared frailties of everyone? He wonders what people think of when they see him! Do they really see him? Do we all wonder about that? I would describe the book as a comedy/tragedy. The reader will decide which takes precedence.

In this rather brilliant short novel, Israeli author David Grossman and his translator Jessica Cohen capture flawlessly the rollercoaster routine of a stand-up comic. Or perhaps that should be tragicomic: Dovelah G veers between conventional joke-telling (most of these are pretty ancient) and an anguished riff on his life, roping in his Netanya audience who don’t know whether to laugh, squirm or walk out in disgust.

The foil to Dovelah’s heartbreaking ‘shtick’ is a shadowy narrator, an old school friend the comic hasn’t seen for forty years. Now a retired judge and grieving widower, he has been called out of the blue and begged to attend the gig. What is the role of this briefly glimpsed ‘I’? Why is Dovelah so keen for him to come? And will he prove to be the stand-up’s ultimate critic?

Throughout this compelling novel, I was reminded of Bob Fosse’s autobiographical film ‘All That Jazz’ in which the director cuts between a dissolute choreographer staging a new show and the editing of a film about a stand-up comic in the mould of Lenny Bruce. Perhaps this was because there was an inherent rawness to both that made the viewer/reader feel so uncomfortable. A Horse Walks into a Bar is a bravado feat of writing that will perhaps be admired more than it is enjoyed.

Do you delight in stories told in new innovative ways, or do you prefer a more traditional form of narration? That is the primary question that will tell you whether you should pick up Grossman’s “A Horse Walks into a Bar.” I for one found this novel endlessly entertaining. Grossman does something I’ve seen nowhere else, telling the story mostly in the form of a stand-up comedy routine by the protagonist (other information provided by a childhood acquaintance that the comedian has invited to watch his show). The story that comes is funny as you might expect. More surprising, is the degree to which it is sad, poignant, and intricately structured to drip details into the reader’s awareness until a deeper picture emerges. And few readers will emerge unaffected.

I also salute Grossman for offering another fine example of the novella form. At under 200 pages, this is a rich complex story powerfully delivered without attempting to break the constraints of that form. Both as craft and a reading experience, “A Horse Walks into a Bar” delivers the goods.

Comedian Doveleh Greenstein steps on stage like a bat out of hell to unleash his jeremiad against himself, Israel, modern culture, modern violence, his own self-destructive parodying ways. He is a tormented soul and even though this novel takes place for the most part on a comedian's stage in Israel it is a tormenting novel about a man with demons, a man who must make a reckoning of all he has done and what he has become, a reckoning that must be witnessed by his childhood friend, the narrator Avishai Lazar.

Doveleh is on the edge of crumbling and he does comedy as a way of holding tooth and nail to his final scrap of sanity. As we read: "The wider his grin gets, the gloomier his face. He looks at me and shrugs helplessly. His entire being conveys the sense that he is about to take a big and disastrous leap which he has no choice to take."

This tormented comedian has secrets that cannot reveal lest I spoil the novella. Suffice to say, this is a pouring out of a tormented soul who is reckless, who is, as the narrator says, "capable of anything."

It's quite a tight-wire act for a 192-page novella to be mostly a comedian's on-stage diatribe, but there you have it, a crazy idea that has been executed wonderfully by the talented David Grossman.

After I finished reading David Grossman’s novel titled, A Horse Walks into a Bar, I was as physically drained as I am after a heavy workout at the gym. The structure of the novel covers one night, the bulk of which we observe as protagonist Doveleh Greenstein performs a standup comedy routine for an audience in Netanya. Dov’s shtick is funny at times, but he is not an endearing character, and much of his humor is dark. I might have been one of the audience members to leave the show. Personal reflections on his life get darker as he describes life with a Holocaust survivor mother and a detached father. Grossman won the Man Booker International Prize for this novel. My guess is that the raw, unremitting truth and the efficient writing appealed to the judges who recognized Grossman’s great skill. Get a good rest before reading this novel, because Dov leaves everything on the stage before he ends his standup and being an audience member listening to him can become physically draining.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

Are you ready for a viscerally jarring novel abut a stand-up comic? Sure you are when you’re in the capable hands of David Grossman.

I’ve toyed lately with the notion of pairing books, the way foods and wines are paired. I think the most recent novel from Grossman, A Horse Walks Into A Bar, fluidly translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, might be paired with Nathaniel West’s 1933 Miss Lonelyhearts, for its formidable daring and masterful fulfillment. You just can’t stop reading it.

My impulse is to call this Grossman’s masterpiece, but the fact of the matter is that he’s written others, notably See Under Love. Surely Grossman is a strong contender for the Nobel Prize, should the committee manage to find its way back to actual literature.

Additional kudos to Oliver Munday for his striking design for the brilliant yellow dust jacket of the U.S. first edition.

Winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. An Israeli stand-up comic uses his routine to tell a few jokes but mostly to recount several emotional crises from his past. Skillfully written, compelling but uncomfortable.

The novel is narrated by a retired district court judge who knew the comedian when they were boys and who has been invited, out of the blue, by the comedian to see his show in a small Israeli town. The novel walks an uncomfortable tightrope between crude jokes and disjointed rants and the bitter pain (from the death of loved ones and from childhood experiences) that lingers for both the comedian and the judge. This discomfort is reflected in the reactions of audience members to the comedian, and by the end of the evening, most of the audience has left; the judge himself struggles with the decision to leave or stay.

The writing is brilliant in its handling of the tension between humor and tragedy, the tension between disliking and liking the comedian, and the unravelling of the story to learn just why the comedian has been taken from the military camp for Israeli teens in the story that makes up most of his stand-up routine.

The novel is also rich in the ways in which it touches on other themes – modern Israeli society, the scars of the Holocaust, the sweet but sometimes damaging power of memory, and the ways in which pain and suffering can often lead to art.

I have never read anything by this writer before. He is quite gifted that's for sure. This book is unlike anything I've ever read before. It isn't really my sort of reading but that doesn't take away from the fact that I really recognize his talent.
The book is around 200 pages long and takes place predominantly in a comedy club while he does his routine. There are some surprises to be had and the last half of the book should hold you captive as it did me.

A world class mensch, a world class writer, a world class work.
When I first saw the title I expected this would be a relatively minor work for Grossman, but I was totally wrong.
The structure is unique, the writing is superb, and this is, in its own way, on par with See: Under Love, which is always high on my list of favorite books.
I fully understand that it is not a book for everyone. It is not fun. It is centered around a monologue. But it is so very deeply heartfelt and human.
This has been shortlisted for the Booker International, and, judges, it deserves to win.

The latest novel from David Grossman, one of Israel's most well-known contemporary writers, is a compact examination of a man in crisis, who, over the course of a searing evening, turns a comedy stage into something more closely resembling a psychiatrist's couch. Relentless and verbally inventive, it's still a less than fully satisfying work that's likely to leave many readers as relieved as the audience remaining when it finally reaches its end.

A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR plays out in the form of an extended standup routine by the comedian Dov Greenstein ("Dovaleh G," as he refers to himself) in a seedy club in the Israeli city of Netanya. The novel's narrator is Avishai Lazar, a childhood acquaintance of Dov's and a retired trial court judge who left the bench in part because of his intemperate courtroom behavior. After 43 years, they reconnect when Dov calls Avishai and asks him to attend his performance. "I want you to look at me," he tells Avishai. "I want you to see me, really see me, and then afterward tell me. … "What you saw."

Overcoming his initial reluctance, Avishai enters the alien environment of the comedy club. To imagine Dov's routine, mix Rodney Dangerfield with Don Rickles, sprinkle over that some Jerry Lewis physical shtick, add a hefty helping of the Borscht Belt (the old joke about the snail who's mugged by two turtles but says he can't identify them because it "happened so fast" finds its way into the routine) and toss in some off-color humor for seasoning.

What's slowly revealed, however, on an evening Dov claims marks his 57th birthday is that he's looking for Avishai to provide much more than a critique of his comedy chops. That becomes clear when he begins to tell the story of his "first funeral," an incident that occurred when Dov and Avishai, then age 14, attended a military summer camp in the Negev.

One day, Dov, the victim of persistent bullying (he trains himself to walk on his hands to distract his tormentors), is summoned home to Jerusalem. Amid his scattershot jokes and nonstop abuse of the audience (whose departing members are tracked by Dov's red slashes on a blackboard), he describes that trip in the company of a driver who fancies himself something of a comic talent.

Dov's account of the seemingly endless ride home, during which the identity of the person whose burial he's attending is cruelly withheld from him, is a bleak oral history of life with an abusive father who works as a barber and runs a business selling rags out of the family's flat and a mother who has survived both the Holocaust and a suicide attempt. Avishai, who never was close to Dov as a child, gradually opens to the comedian's suffering, even summoning, in snippets of painful memory, the recent loss of his own wife. He understands that Dov's story, mingled as it is with his barrage of jokes, has "annihilated the possibility of laughter," leaving the audience to choose between departing or yielding to "the temptation that is so hard to resist --- the temptation to look into another man's hell."

Grossman succeeds in capturing the claustrophobia of the comedy club and the damnably difficult job of the standup comic whose routine isn't connecting, complicated by Dov's desperation to pour out his life to the uneasy onlookers, most of whom are unprepared to serve as his emotional sounding board. "Can you believe he's using us to work out his hang-ups?" one complains as he leaves with a group of patrons who "stream out like hurrying refugees."

A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR is something less than a major work from a novelist of David Grossman's range and depth. It seems, at times, more of an exercise, in which the multitalented Grossman set for himself the task of working in a highly constrained, almost laboratory-like environment. It's possible to admire that creativity while recognizing that the novel ultimately fails to land the sought-for emotional punch.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

A very upsetting book about an Israeli stand-up comedian who contacts a childhood friend and asks him to come to a stand up performance and tell him "what he sees". The book is narrated by this acquaintance and both he and the comedian undergo some profound emotional realizations. Beautifully written.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing, Jonathan Cape for providing me with an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
This is the first book I’ve read by David Grossman. I hope it won’t be the last.
The description probably gives a fair idea of the plot. Yes, we are in Netanya, Israel, and we are spectators of the act of a stand-up comedian, Dovelah Greenstein (or Dov G.). He is 57 years old (as he repeatedly reminds us through the evening), skinny (almost emaciated), and seems to become increasingly desperate as the night goes. He tells jokes, anecdotes, makes comments about the city, the spectators, Jews (yes, the self-deprecation readers of Philip Roth, for example, will be familiar with), says some politically incorrect things, tells a number of jokes (some really funny, some odd, some quite old), and insists on telling us a story about his childhood, despite the audience’s resistance to listening to it.
The beauty (or one of them) of the novel, is the narrator. Yes, I’m back to my obsession with narrators. The story is told in the first-person by Avishai Lazar, a judge who was unceremoniously removed from his post when he started becoming a bit too vocal and opinionated in his verdicts. The two characters were friends as children, and Dov calls Avishai asking him to attend his performance. His request does not only come completely out of the blue (they hadn’t seen each other since they were in their teens), but it is also quite weird. He does not want a chat, or to catch up on old times. He wants the judge to tell him what he sees when he looks at him. He wants him to tell him what other people see, what essence they perceive when they watch him. Avishai, who is a widower and still grieving, is put-off by this and reacts quite rudely, but eventually, agrees.
Although the novel is about Dov’s performance and his story (his need to let it all hang out, to explain his abuse but also his feeling of guilt about a personal tragedy), that is at times light and funny, but mostly sad and even tragic, he is not the character who changes and grows the most during the performance (his is an act of exorcism, a way of getting rid of his demons). For me, the story, sad and depressing as it can be at times (this is not a book for everybody, and I suspect many readers will empathise with quite a few of the spectators who leave the performance before it ends), is ultimately about redemption. Many narrators have told us in the past (The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness) that in telling somebody else’s story, they are also telling their own. This is indeed the case here. The judge (at first we don’t know who is narrating the story, but we get more and more details as the performance advances) is very hostile at first and keeps wondering why he is there, and wanting to leave. But at some point, the rawness, the determination, and the sheer courage of the comedian, who keeps going no matter how difficult it gets, break through his protective shell and he starts to question his own actions and his life. If this might be Dev’s last performance, in a way it is a beginning of sorts, especially for the judge.
Readers become the ersatz club audience, and it is very difficult to stop watching something that is so extreme and desperate, but it is also difficult to keep watching (or reading) as it becomes more and more painful. It is as if we were spectators in a therapy session where somebody is baring his soul. We feel as if we are intruding on an intimate moment, but also that perhaps we are providing him with some comfort and support to help him go through the process. Although other than the two main characters we do not get to know the rest in detail, there are familiar types we might recognise, and there is also a woman who knew the comedian when he was a child and, perhaps, plays the part of the therapist (a straight faced one, but the one he needs).
The book is beautifully written and observed. Grossman shows a great understanding of psychology and also of group interactions. Although I am not an expert on stand-up comedy, the dynamics of the performance rang true to me. I cannot compare it to the original, but the translation is impressive (I find it difficult to imagine anybody could do a better job, and if the original is even better, well…).
As I said before, this is not a book for everybody. Although it is quite short, it is also slow and intense (its rhythm is that of the performance, which ebbs and flows). None of the characters (except, perhaps, the woman) are immediately sympathetic, and they are flawed, not confident enough or too confident and dismissive, over-emotional or frozen and unable to feel, and they might not seem to have much in common with the reader, at first sight. This is not a genre book (literary fiction would be the right label, if we had to try and give it one), there is no romance (or not conventional romance), no action, no heroes or heroines, and not much happens (a whole life happens, but not in the usual sense). If you are interested in characters that are real in their humanity (for better and for worse), don’t mind a challenge, and want to explore something beyond the usual, I recommend you this book.

David Grossman, born in 1954, who lives in Jerusalem, Israel, is the author of ten acclaimed novels and four non-fiction books. His works have been translated into forty languages, he is the winner of numerous prizes, his writings appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines, and he can be seen on YouTube. “A Horse walks into a Bar” was written in Hebrew in 2014 and translated into English by Jessica Cohen in 2017. It is only 194 pages long.
It is about a stand-up comic named Dov Greenstein who telephones a boyhood friend Avishai Lazar, who he hasn’t seen in decades, who was a district court judge who was fired from his job as a judge three years ago for repeatedly making caustic and degrading remarks about the people who appeared before him, including lawyers. Dov requests Avishai to come for about an hour and a half to hear him do a stand-up comic routine. He promises to pay all his expenses. All he wants from Avishai is for the judge to give him his reactions to what he hears, even in a sentence. This makes no sense to the judge who suspects that the comic wants something else, but he agrees and attends.
As he sits and listens to the comic insult his audience, which is his routine and the routine of many other comics, he begins to remember his short relationship with the comic when he was a boy. He recalls that the comic was severely mistreated in the past by bullies. He remembers that something happened to end their relationship, and there was something other than the bullying that happened to the comic as a youngster. He watches as the audience as a whole are insulted and how individuals were pointed out for insults, and yet they generally laughed. But there was one very small woman in the audience whom he insulted who did not laugh. She said that she knew the comic as a child, that he frequently walked on his hands rather than his feet, and stressed that he was a good boy.
It is fascinating to ponder why the audience laughed. What is the psychological reason for the comic’s insults, his need to do so, and the people’s laughter despite being belittled?