Kalooki Nights - Softcover

Jacobson, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143170899 ISBN 13: 9780143170891

Synopsis

Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother's glamorous card evenings to look forward to, and photographs of his father's favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, and the impossibility of forgetting. Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it's a life. Or it seems a life until Max's long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, Max is drawn into Manny's family history - above all his brother's tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.

About this title

Review:

"Here he is at the top of his form in a comic/tragic epic". -- Melvyn Bragg, The Guardian

"The biggest laugh and the biggest cry since Angela Carter's Small
Children." -- Simon Schama, Observer.

"The raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heartbreaking Kalooki Nights is a novel that stands toe-to-toe with the greats" -- Sunday Telegraph

"raised his game... to fresh heights and depths" -- Independent: Christmas books

'This is turbocharged; someone has put a rocket under Jacobson, and the result is scintillating' -- Evening Standard

'a masterpiece ...a brilliantly constructed, playful, evocative, hilarious, midnight dark novel' -- Sunday Herald

A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip
Roth at his... best.’
-- Jonathan Freedland, Jewish Chronicle

an uncompromising and uncomfortably funny novel
-- Metro - Best Fiction of 2006

‘likely to be the funniest book published this year...prose sharper and brighter than any of his contemporaries’ -- The Observer

· ‘a welcome return to the bittersweet Yiddish-inspired humour at which Jacobson excels...comparisons with Philip Roth...a gloriously pugnacious novel' -- The Guardian

From the Publisher:

Howard Jacobson's blackest - and funniest - novel to date.

About this edition

• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0143170899
• ISBN 13: 9780143170891
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 472