The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz [Paperback]

Mordecai Richler (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Penguin Books Canada, Limited (1995)
• ASIN: B000SN4XR0
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a sad/funny look at an over-achieving flim-flam man (boy), December 12, 2002

By 

lazza (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Mass Market Paperback)

Mordecai Richler is certainly one of Canada's best novelists. His caustic sense of humour, his self-deprecating look at life, and his sometimes thinly disguised autobiographical stories are always memorable. Imagine Joseph (Catch-22) Heller being from Montreal and you have Mordecai Richler.

Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is one of Richler's earlier and better known (..thanks to the 1970s film adaptation) works. The story centers around a young Jewish teenager (Duddy), a very abrasive and aggressive boy, striving to make money in order to buy land (thinking, like his grandpa, that if you don't own land you ain't nuttin'). So Duddy gets into a strange, and hilarious, film-making business. His pushy and obnoxious behaviour both appalls and endears everyone he meets; I too was appalled and endeared. By the end of the book I felt I knew (but didn't like) Duddy.

While I did enjoy 'Duddy Kravitz' I have to say it certainly isn't Richler's best effort. I suggest Barney's Version, written some 30 years later, which demonstrates the author's abilities at his peak.

Bottom line: an endearing story of a lost youth in Montreal circa 1950. Fondly memorable.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Exilerating Novel, June 30, 2000

By 

David Earl Bruhn (Honolulu, HI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Paperback)

This book is fast paced, vulgar, funny, and human. The world of Duddy Kravitz--an extraordinary Jewish teenager in Montreal in the 1940's--may sound very far removed from our lives, but very few things I have read have struck me as being so irresistably recognisable as life. It would be to deny yourself an immense pleasure not to read this book. Certain chapters are as classic as things we remember from great 19th century literature.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ..., that's all the band could play..., January 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book.

While the first two or three chapters are not really needed in the novel, I found the character of Duddy Kravitz repulsive but strangely satisfying as a character. Cliched my ass. Okay, Max, Jerry Dingleman and Lennie are cliched, but you also get Virgil the epileptic, John Friar the Americommunist filmmaker, Yvette the "Girl Friday" who holds Duddy's land for him, and of course, you have the anti-Semitic Scot Mr. Macpherson. Sure it may sound cliched, but this was written 40 years ago. Cliches have come from this line of writing.

I may be a masochist but it's FUUUN to see Kravitz screw and be screwed. And Richler knows how to write a book. In my opinion, it may be nothing new, but at least it's nothing bad.....