Kalooki Nights [Kindle Edition]

Howard Jacobson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British comic author Jacobson unfolds his mordantly unsettling but hilarious ninth novel in retrospect. Cartoonist Max Glickman has built an uncertain career lampooning his own Judaism, while his relationships have been restricted to "women with diaereses or umlauts" (including ex-wives Chloë and Zoë). His introverted childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, grows up to commit a ghastly crime (also shiksa-related), but in their early adolescence, the two boys get together in an abandoned air raid shelter in 1950s Manchester to work on a comic-book history of Jewish suffering, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, completed years later by Max. The two meet again after decades, when Manny is released from prison and Max is hired by a TV production company headed by a Nazi sympathizer, in one of many caustic ironies, to develop a film treatment based on Manny's life. Paradoxically, it leads Max to real revelations about their pasts and their identities. The factual horror of the Holocaust is always close to the emotional core of this twisted tour de force—Max's fugue-like expletive-spewing first person reads like a British Zuckerman completely unbound—but Jacobson (The Making of Henry) tempers the profane with meditations on what it means to be British and Jewish. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Cartoonist Max Glickman's Jewishness, never far from mind, is his continuing subject. Raised in a nonobservant household outside Manchester, England, in the 1950s--where his atheist father sought to make Jewishness less of a burden and his mother played kalooki, a rummylike game favored by Jews--he was educated on the Holocaust by childhood friends. It was meek Manny Washinsky who first shared the Scourge of the Swastica, leading the two of them to develop the comic-book-history Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, later published by Max. And it was Manny who would murder his parents, gassing them in their beds, a deed that Max at midlife seeks to understand, initially in the interest of making a film. Jacobson's work has been described as seriously funny, and this fits that bill, ranging from theological debate (where was Elohim during Jewish persecutions?) to Max's accounts of his three marriages (to two shiksas and one Jewess, all with umlauts or diaereses in their names) to the descriptions of his cartoons. Jacobson's prose is pure pleasure--concise, markedly insightful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny--and his message, ultimately, is a heartbreaker. An exceptional novel. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 708 KB
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 3, 2007)
• Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000OVLKRM
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128,942 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #80 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish

More About the Author

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Act of Love. Howard Jacobson lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Kalooki Nights, January 7, 2008

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kalooki Nights: A Novel (Hardcover)

Kalooki Nights by the English novelist Howard Jacobson tells a story of an English Jewish community in Manchester, England in the years following WW II. The chief protagonist is the narrator, Max Glickman, a cartoonist who has had three wives, two non-Jewish and anti-semitic, and one Jewish, who also endeavors to loosen Judaism's hold on Max. Max's father was an aspiring boxer who became an atheist and tries to give both Max and his other child, his daughter Shani, a secular life. Shani marries a non-Jewish man in what proves to be a successful relationship. Max's mother is an inveterate player of a card game called Kalooki, with a group of other Jewish women.

The book recounts Max's relationship with his childhood friend Manny Washinsky. Unlike Max, Manny was raised in an orthodox household. Manny teaches Max of the horrors of the Holocaust. When Max's older brother becomes romantically involved with a non-Jewish woman and the parents do everything in their power to terminate the relationship, Max ultimately gasses them to death in their bed and spends many years in prision. Years later Max and Manny meet again, when an anti-semitic television producer hires Max to do research on a story about Manny.

In many ways, this book is a cross between "Portnoy's Complaint" and other early books by Philip Roth and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", the story of two American Jewish cartoonists, by Michael Chabon. The book has as some of its themes the tension between secularism and traditional religiosity as options for modern Jews, the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish life and belief, and the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, particularly as the relationships involve sexuality and intimacy.

The book is funny in many places and insightful in some. But it is told in a blustery, wandering, and diffuse style which make it difficult to follow. The language is wordy, profane, and satirical -- probably in an attempt to create some artistic distance between the author and the events which he describes -- but much of the book I found painful. The characters, Jewish and non-Jewish, are full of bigotry for each other and hatred for themselves. Sexual themes play a large role in the book, as the Jewish men are embittered towards Jewish women -- thinking that the women will not become involved in a sexual relationship with them -- and the non-Jewish women are drawn to what they think they perceive of Jewish men. This is a story that has been told before, and it is drummed in unmercifully in this novel.

Some of this story has a context broader than the ambiguous situation that, for the author, many Jewish people find themselves in or create for themselves. The author deals implicitly with the need of people to find spirituality for themselves without the extremes of total secularism on the one hand on routinized fundamenalism or othodoxy on the other hand. But the self-pitying, solipsistic outlook of most of the characters of the book, together with its windy, unorganized character, make this novel a chore to read and largely unsuccessful.

Robin Friedman

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Literately Hilarious Book, September 1, 2007

By 

Ronald H. Raybin "Ronharv" (Mission Viejo, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kalooki Nights: A Novel (Hardcover)

You're gonna plotz before you find plots here. And if you lack at least a minimal Jewish background,or don't much care a some modern Jews and their wrestlings with identity, lust, love, religion, and whirlagig confusions, then you probably won't laugh, inwardly and outwardly, at the stylistically marvelous feats of humor that Howard Jacobson pulls off in this uniquely entertaining reading experience. I think that the Washington Post reviewer is really off base when he laments that the book is old hat. I've read umpteen Jewish authors over the years, and Kalooki Nights is entirely new hat to me. But the cartoony title! Yikes! Marginally relevant at best. Finally, the book does ramble. But so does my Uncle Bernie, who, nevertheless, is really enthralling to listen to.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars and you thought you were obsessed about Jews..., June 28, 2007

By 

Raphael Rubin (Merion Station, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kalooki Nights: A Novel (Hardcover)

Jonathan Safran Foer noted in the NY Times that Kalooki Nights "is a tragedy, and a work of genius". Indeed, it is a masterpiece. I laughed and cried from start to end.
Membership in the tribe (or honorary membership) may be necessary to absorb its full impact. Indeed, if any recent book emerges as a Jewish classic, this will be the one. Jacobson is now in the Pantheon.