A very different read from what I am used to - thankfully! Very self indulgent and as much as I tried, I had no sympathy for the main character. I eventually got bored and had to give up which I hate doing but my TBR list is not allowing me to waste time on a book like this. Don't bother with it 👎

This book has some wonderful features. Firstly, the premise of a stand-up comedian revealing his personal trauma while on stage is an intriguing and entertaining narrative vehicle. Grossman really uses the setting to his advantage, with some very awkward moments where the comic's joke fall on a silent or increasingly disgruntled audience. The tension is palpable.

Grossman uses the book to explore the impact of loss - parental, cultural, national - while giving us a portrait of modern Israel., The comic's parents represent an old Israel defined by its Holocaust-surviving inhabitants and their loss is a metaphor for the journey the country is taking to define itself as that generation fades.

The book is small (around 200 pages) but a dense and complex read. I struggled to keep engaged and enthused at some points, often finding the comic's narrative repetitive and slow. My frustrations were echoed by the audience's impatience as if Grossman deliberately planted those scenes to aggravate his literary and real-life audience simultaneously.

It's a much heavier read that you'd expect from the blurb and it's packed with emotional trauma. It's well crafted and beautifully translated; I appreciated its artistry but it was a little too dour for me to really enjoy it.

This challenging and enigmatic novel takes place over two hours in a comedy club in a small town in Israel. Dovaleh Greenstein, a middle-aged comedian, through a series of often brutal jokes and increasingly personal revelations, which reach back to a traumatic childhood event, gradually disintegrates in front of his audience’s eyes. He’s a deeply troubled man but his listeners gradually come to the end of their patience with his ramblings until the only one left is an old childhood friend, a retired judge, whom Dov invited to be a witness to his outpourings. I found this quite a troubling book in that I’m not sure what the point of it is. I can see that Dov is haunted by his past and in fact haunted by the past of all Jews. I can see also that his friend is there to perhaps judge him or perhaps absolve him. It’s uncomfortable listening to some of the jokes. Any book that deals with Jewish suffering is as relevant as ever – and as heart-breaking. But……I felt little for Dov, in spite of his obvious trauma. I felt no sympathy for him. I couldn’t see why he chose that particular method of pouring out his heart and soul – surely knowing that he would alienate his audience. What, ultimately does he achieve? I certainly didn’t enjoy the book, much as I wouldn’t have enjoyed being there in that club. Right now I’m still feeling ambivalent about what I think of the book as a work of literature. Has it been over-hyped? Have I missed something? Not sure. It is, nevertheless, a book that will long stay with me.

A stand-up comedian, Dovaleh G invites a retired judge to watch his show. Afterwards he wants to know what you saw…What do people know when they look at me…the thing that comes out of a person without his control. But it’s hardly an evening of comedy: even when he laughs, his look is calculating and joyless; the jokes are tasteless and cruel, and the slapstick is violent. No one is exempt – those with disabilities and even victims of the Holocaust: she had a lot of experience with camping…although her camps were more of the concentration variety.
Soon, as the jokes are dropped and the show becomes more autobiography than stand-up, members of the audience start to walk out. But, like the judge, we can’t turn away or avert our gaze. We want to know why – what has happened to the funny kid with glasses and prominent lips that the judge once knew as a child forty years previously, to turn him into this monster? As Dovaleh’s show spirals down, and the judge experiences increasingly gloomy and often angry memories, we gradually piece together a version of the story. The final scenes are stretched out to an almost unbearable breaking point as we witness the trauma that has marked Dovaleh for life and is constantly in his dreams. Such dirt on me, such pollution… God, all the way to my bones…We watch like voyeurs, but we still can’t look away. We’re gripped until the end.
This profoundly moving novel holds up the conflict inherent in using human suffering for art, the relationship between the performer and the audience, our complicity and the uncomfortable space where these all meet. We see both the inner glow. Or the inner darkness. The secret, the tremble of singularity of ordinary personal loss (the judge) and the loss that never stops and colours a whole life (Dovaleh). We see how we tell the story of our own lives to ourselves and what we choose to forget.
The overarching question raised by this deeply sad but often very wild and funny novel, is the question of anti-Semitism, the ‘Jewish’ question, whose echoes continue to reverberate down the generations since the Holocaust.
A Horse Walks into a Bar is not an easy read – it is harrowing, poignant and powerful. But it is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and now a worthy winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2017, shared between the author, David Grossman and his English translator, Jessica Cohen.

This was my second read from the Man Booker International prize shortlist and, whilst I did not exactly 'get' this book, I can wholeheartedly see why it has garnered this acclaim.

This book was... bizarre! The novel's concept is of a stand-up comedian delivering more than just the expected one-liners and, instead, giving his audience a harsh and stark insight into culture and society. Just like the audience, as the jokes gave way to something darker, I was often left confused with what I was being served.

There was certainly power in this book and both the audience and the reader are privy to witnessing a man coming undone before their very eyes, but managing to deliver a dark and irrepressible something in the midst of his personal chaos.

The book focuses on the themes of societies horribly malfunctioning and it was an important and thought-provoking read because of that. Yet there was just something about this... Something I couldn't wholly grasp or sink my teeth into. Perhaps that is due to the immensity of the topics discoursed, or perhaps because of the abstract form of their delivery. Whatever it was, it has me at a loss to discern how I truly feel about this book. But, perhaps that is the very nature of what makes it so powerful? Because true art is never straight-forward and easy to interpret.

Once again David Grossman reveals his genius for creating hugely affecting and yet appalling characters. The premise is quite simple. The narrator (court judge Avishai Lazar) has been invited to watch a stand-up performance by a man he briefly knew as a boy. This performance, recorded “verbatim” along with reactions from the audience and reminiscences by the narrator. As the show develops it becomes increasingly and intensely personal as the comic relates a painful event from his childhood. Sometimes he plays this for laughs with the blackest of humour but increasingly loses his hold on his comedy and his audience. It is a slow but inevitable collapse of a routine and a man. Simple, yes, but easy? No. There are very few writers with the vision and the control necessary to make such a narrative a success but Grossman is one of them.

There were times when I hated this book. I hated the crassness of many of the jokes, the casual prejudice, a deep unpleasantness in the way Dovaleh Greenstein plays the tragedy and cruelty of the Arab-Israeli conflict for cheap laughs and thinks nothing of stooping to the lowest common denominator. But this is precisely where Grossman’s talent shines because it is a pitch-perfect rendering of the best and worst of stand-up comedy with all the pitfalls and pratfalls laid bare. After all there is something deeply (if not always commendably) human in our capacity to make a (bad) joke out of anything. Anything for a laugh.

One Grossman’s great talents is his facility for placing the ridiculous and the painful side by side so that both are heart-breaking. By interspersing the sometimes humorous often uncomfortable ranting of Davoleh and his sudden bursts of self-contempt and violence, with the memories of his former friend and current audience-member we form a complex picture of a deeply flawed man. It is natural to despise him but Grossman won’t let you rest on that, he will not let you take the easy way out. As he spins out the story of his life the unpleasantness of his character and manner become less about a person and more about the tragedy of lives spoilt by conflict and propaganda and a context which seeks to destroy the ability to feel compassion and empathy. Davoleh is a product of his surroundings and his experience and that is the really tragic joke.

“How did [Davoleh] do that?” Lazar wonders at one point “How, in such a short time, did he manage to turn the audience, even me to some extent, into household members of his soul? And into his hostages?”. One might wonder the same about Grossman who can push and prod you to the very edge of giving up in disgust and always reel you back in

Well, I rattled through this one. A Horse Walks into a Bar is a book that grabs you and takes you with it whether you want to go or not. And some of the time I wasn’t sure if I did want to go. Dov G is an Israeli comedian of the type that insults his audience – think Lennie Bruce but not so blue, or Frankie Boyle but not so political. He homes in on his audience’s frailties and picks at scabs – both theirs and his own.

His old friend from schooldays, now a reired Judge, has come to Netanya to see Dov’s performance. The pair haven’t seen each other for 40 years but Dov has begged the Judge to come and tell him what he sees. Is there something in everyone that cannot be hidden? If so, the Judge with his experience of studying defendants will be able to see it. In the crowd is a tiny woman who also knew Dov as a child. He was nice to her then but isn’t now. She cries at his barbed comments but refuses to leave.

When the jokes come they are not always funny and even when they are there is an unpleasant background taste. Along with his stand-up Dov tells the tale of how he went to his first funeral, even though he didn’t know who had died. The audience get restless; some leave. Those remaining call for more laughs. This is not what they paid to see.

While Dov strips himself and the crowd bare, the Judge recalls his own shameful part in an incident for which he is sure Dov will excoriate him before long. He also reminisces about his dead wife. He eats and drinks but cannot seem to fill himself up.

Dov’s jokes get fewer and less funny and more people leave. The tables in the supper club are emptying. The tiny woman, Pitz, is still there and a few other stalwarts. Dov punches himself, punishes himself, makes himself bleed. The revelation of the cause of his self-hatred is not totally unexpected but still, it could have been otherwise. He wipes the sweat from his brow, says ‘Goodnight Netanya’ to the almost empty club, and finishes what is probably his last ever performance.

This is an unusual and brilliant book. The stage show is presented visually so that we see Dov’s very physical performance. We feel his sweat and his pain. We dislike him but cannot stop watching him. Ultimately, there may be some kind of redemption – for him and the Judge.

I read about 35% of the book, but then I decided to abandon it. The story, as far as I read it, did not catch me: I'm not a fan of stand up comedy, and the plot was quite boring and too slow.

I found this book rather a disturbing read, having expected it to resemble a stand-up routine - full of laughs and wit. It did in fact detail a stand-up routine by Dovaleh G, veteran performer, which rambled and ranged through the main events of his life specifically for his invited audience to include a former friend from his youth. It seems no myth that comedians are the least amusing and convivial of the population, as we are treated to his angst and reminiscences of his childhood and the agonising choices he has to make, which colour his whole life. It also shows us through the reactions of his audience a reflection of how he appears and sees himself, and we gradually discover the connections between his past and present. The book does indeed take us through a rather depressing and dated stand-up routine, but through it we see a deeper, more nuanced exploration of prejudice, abuse and misery, and the attempts made to overcome and come to terms with their effects.

This is a short but impactful novel .

The book gives you the feeling that you are at a stand up gig , some of the jokes land and there is an emotional heft .
The books structure may be its only flaw as the act continues the tone changes and it feels like a misstep although that is deliberate .

this is a good book that starts strong and whilst it finishes on a down beat note that is the authors choice .

Highly recommended

A fast paced read that will stay with you long after you've finished. Recommended.

Dovaleh is a comedian, performing his one man stand up show at a small club venue. However, the comedy soon turns into an intimate personal reflection on his past, not what the audience had anticipated - except perhaps for one special invitee.
Dovaleh's story pulls the reader along, gripping more tightly as it proceeds. We, the reader, belong to those audience members who choose not to leave the venue - we've bought into his story, never mind the fact we may have been looking for comedy, we need to hear him out.
This book took a little getting in to, but once Dovaleh turns to the past his words are compulsive and the need to keep reading might mean you postpone other activities for a few days!

An intriguing look into bereavement and trauma in the guise of an unravelling comic. Set on a stage, the comedian performs an intimate act in the presence of a former student and colleague. It is a gritty, disturbing and excruciating read to see how he undoes himself in the space of one night. It is also revealing how little sympathy and empathy he receives. It is a well structured piece of literary fiction, moving back and forth through past and present narratives. Well deserved of a Man Booker Prize nomination.

What an ordeal! I found this book as painful to read as his audience found it to listen to its hero, but just like at least some of them, I found it hard to leave. I see one review compares the tortured comic to Norman Wisdom - I think Archie Rice is a closer model. Was it my imagination, or did the judge become more like his childhood friend as the story unravelled ? Certainly the contrast between the two men diminished. Was it a good read ? Yes without a doubt. Was it a pleasure to read ? Definitely not, but it says a lot for the author that I felt I owed to the chief character to hear his story right to the end, and the last paragraph was just the coda they (and I) needed

This is not a relaxing read but it's a completely gripping, memorable and rather brilliant one. I only tried it because I'd heard it favourably spoken of; I rather expected to hate it, but it turned out to be excellent.

A summary of A Horse Walks Into A Bar sounds pretty off-putting: set in Israel (and translated from the Hebrew), it is narrated by a retired judge who receives a completely unexpected phone call from Devaleh, with whom he was, briefly, good friends at school. Devaleh asks him to attend his stand-up act observe and speak honestly to him afterward. Almost the whole book is then an account of the evening as Devaleh, who is plainly ill and possibly dying, mixes a little conventional stand-up with an account of the trauma of his childhood as he comes near to breakdown on stage. In fact, it was excellent and I was completely riveted by the whole thing; I was very keen to know what happened next both in Devaleh's story and in the comedy bar where the audience are finding his performance very troubling, to say the least.

It's very edgy stuff a lot of the time. There are a few genuine laugh-out-loud gags, but even the comedy routine is often disturbing – for example, a comedy riff on Dr Mengele is always going to divide an audience, shall we say. Dev's story is brilliantly told as the comedic aspect of being a picked-on putz becomes steadily more serious, and the brilliance of writing – and translation – had me right there feeling the same elation and extreme discomfort described in the audience. There is some very important stuff here, with genuine psychological insights and a fine illustration that comedy and human pain are often closely linked.

I found this original, enthralling, unsettling and very moving. Warmly recommended.

(I received and ARC via Netgalley.)

This book took me through the whole range of emotions. It is beautifully written and superbly translated, characters are vivid and real. I felt as I was there, sitting amongst the audience, watching the drama unfold in front of me. Reading it was like going on a roller coaster journey, I can't say I enjoyed the experience but it took my breath away.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Hi

Thanks so much for the ARC of this book. Unfortunately, I couldn't get on with it, nothing was wrong with the writing it just didn't really catch my attention enough so I wasn't able to finish it.

Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to read it.

Leonie

This was definitely something different, it wasn't the sort of book I would normally go for but it was an interesting read. With its use of stand-up comedy, I would recommend it to those who enjoyed The Sellout by Paul Beatty. The reason I haven't given a higher rating is because I found the main character repellent and this sometimes made it hard to keep wanting to read. However, I did find it rewarding in the end.