A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman

This second tale that permeates the comic script is a rendition of the workings of young Dovaleh’s mind during a long drive back to a home he knows will never be the same. He invites an old childhood friend, now a retired judge, to pass a verdict on his character, and delivers a performance that gradually turns into a confession, involving his loss of a parent at the age of fourteen. is a 57-year old stand-up comedian who, in the grip of an illness that is ravaging his body, has chosen tonight’s performance to put himself through a kind of trial. The story reveals itself in precise doses: Dovaleh G. Such peculiar choices – in this case the comedy bar at the Netanya industrial zone – are ideal for staging the relationship between art and life, between what is said and what is expressed silently, and between actor and spectator. Grossman – both author and activist – yearns for a language that is dynamic, particular, and inventive, and well-defined genres can often dictate such unexpected vocabularies.

From a story written as a glossary of encyclopaedic definitions, through an epistolary love affair that turns nasty, to a poetic rendition of grief and the afterlife – and now the stand-up routine, Grossman has searched widely for the right literary frame to showcase an ineffable ‘real’.

Grossman’s readers should have learned to expect the unexpected. Why did one of Israel’s most distinguished authors, the darling of that country’s intellectual Left, cross over to the world of stand-up comedy, shocking even his most loyal fans with his command of the vernacular, if not the outright vulgar? In June 2017, Israeli author David Grossman and his English translator, Jessica Cohen, were awarded the Man Booker International Prize for the novel Sus Echad Nichnas Lebar, first published in Hebrew in 2014 and published in Cohen’s English translation as A Horse Walks into A Bar in 2016. ‘I want you to see me, really see me, and then afterwards tell me.’

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman