of Howard Jacobson (Cargo Edition)
"It has never been in touch with you?"
"Asher?" No ".
"No news of any kind?"
"No".
"Not even a line?"
"No".
"We are an unforgiving people."
think about that my observation, drawing back a lock of hair graying isolated from. "Well, it was still an experience."
"Are you married?"
shook his head. Then he laughed, with a laugh as a kid I would have expected. "As long as you do not want to call it marriage, my relationship with Manny."
I smiled too. I knew something.
looked on the other end of the room where Manny was still engaged in conversations with Mick Kalooki. Waved her hands as she spoke, and his tongue lizard licked something in front of him. The head always looked like that of a child, but his eyes were turned off. No, you could call it marriage, his relationship with Manny. But then my ideas about what a marriage was rather bizarre.
"I wonder" I said "you do not have cursed us all for having ruined my life."
"My life?". He seemed surprised that I could think such a thing. "My life was like many others. It 's your to be ruined. "
The Kalooki is a game to be carried out with 2 decks of cards, similar to Rummy and the scale 40 and, like any game that takes place around a table, sometimes is transformed into a game of ' gambling, with all the risks and consequences.
And, with the same risks and consequences, Howard Jacobson, a professor of literature, writer, essayist and columnist English almost unknown in Italy (only recently we met in Mantua ), has transformed the endless evenings kalooki conducted by the mother of Max Glickman, the protagonist and narrator of the novel Kalooki Nights in a story so exceptional that, for those who want to dig deep humor in Yiddish and English, shocking. Compared to
Philip Roth for the literary virtuosity (in truth I see him closer to Bruno Schulz ) and Woody Allen for the terrible force sarcastic, the writer can tell a perfectly witty and playful in tone, hidden within the high registers a chilling British humor, the tragedy that really shines through every page, ruthless to the end.
background theme, the friendship between Max and Manny , both belonging to the Manchester Jewish '50s, but in contexts wholly opposite: one grew up with a father, an atheist, communist and boxing fanatic, a passionate mother by playing cards, a sister slave of his own wardrobe and an uncle haunted by the fear of a pogrom, the other born into an Orthodox family, strictly observant, unnaturally quiet and incredibly unhappy, he will build on their own their own downfall.
cartoonist by profession, Max throughout history, sometimes paradoxical, the misadventures of her life between family, friends failed marriages and sex maniacs and the Holocaust, two entities similarly mysterious and perverse, twisted to the drama of Manny, he will assume the task of rebuilding, after many years in the form of script. Why Manny, against every expectation, before the love between the brother Asher and Dorothy , blocked by the most reprehensible by their parents because of German nationality and not of her Judaism, has become a murderess, and the gesture madly and desperately did not save the love but, inadvertently, has caused the irretrievable destruction.
Beyond the numerous literary quotations and descriptive terms in Hebrew and Yiddish, intentionally devoid of translation because the player is capable of perceiving the true meaning of all those elements that, in short, lend an atmosphere and a trace ' typically Jewish identity (remember all the stories the "Court" the father of Isaac B. Singer ) in history, Howard Jacobson's novel manages to be both ironic, romantic and poignant.
The classic tragedy of love impossible, for those reasons denied by reason itself, is first in love, then hate, and finally in death, is certainly not a characteristic of Jewish literature, but in an era and a place where the shadow of the Holocaust still looms, assume (as has happened to Bienviellaints of Jonathan Littel ) shades of melancholy and desolation that belong only to the masterpieces.
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