Customer Reviews

The Mighty Walzer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I defy you to keep silent while reading this acerbic, very auto-biographical book. My wife nearly divorced me on the spot for all the sighing and laughing. Very funny, very moving - but if you're anti-Semitic or at all prudish, forget it. There's something of Portnoy in here, of course - how else, he implies, do table tennis players make those wristy shots work so well? Jacobson's great achievement is to make the prosaic but strangely magnificent sport of table tennis the stuff of great literature. (And unless being ridiculously funny means that a book can't count as great, this is high quality material.) You don't have to be coked up like Patsy in Ab Fab to find the whole procedure irresistible. Highly recommended.

The Mighty Walzer is a coming-of-age novel served to American readers with a whole lot of backspin. That is because Oliver Walzer, hero of Howard Jacobson's The Mighty Walzer, did his growing up in 1950s Manchester, England - specifically in a part of Manchester predominately populated by Jewish families like his own.

If shyness could kill, Oliver Walzer would never have reached puberty. That he did reach puberty, although he did not do a whole lot with the opportunities inherent to that stage of life, and go on to have a fairly "normal" life almost seems like an accident now, even to Oliver. The first accident was that he found a competition-grade Ping-Pong ball and brought it home with him one day. The second, was his discovery, by banging that ball off a wall with his hardbound copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that he was a Ping-Pong natural.

Ping-Pong, and his father's insistence that Oliver use his unusual skills to meet other players ( as a way of forcing him out of the house for his own good), would be Oliver's ticket to the rest of his life. Suddenly, he was among like-minded people who came to accept him as one of their own; he had teammates; he learned to at least talk a good game about women, even though he seldom practiced his skills in that arena; and he had a goal: to become a world champion Ping-Pong player. Well, that's the good news, because I'm making Oliver's transition to adulthood sound a whole lot easier than it was.

The odds were against Oliver from the start. Surrounded by a gaggle of sexually repressed aunts who loved to give him baths, it is little wonder that the little boy would himself be sexually confused. Witness his habit of cutting headshots of his aunts and pasting them onto the bodies of women in the risqué photos he spent hours visiting in the family's one bathroom. But grow into a man Oliver does, and Howard Jacobson makes it an interesting, if somewhat frustrating transition (even for the reader, who is likely to want to shake some common sense into Oliver, or other family members, on more than one occasion).

That Jacobson often uses 1950s British slang and Yiddish references in the conversation between his characters might be off-putting to some, but this adds an authenticity to the conversations that would otherwise be missing - and it becomes easier and easier on the reader as he develops an "ear" for unusual words and phrases. Imagine Philip Roth "squared" and you will have the right first impression of The Mighty Walzer.

I gave this book three stars because I lost interest in some parts. I enjoyed the characters personal experiences and thoughts but often got bored during the excessive ping pong parts. HAHA.
There were some hilarious parts to the book though and it often made me feel like I was reading a Philip Roth novel.

The Mighty Walzer is a comic coming-of-age novel about a Jewish boy growing up in Manchester, UK, in the 1950s and 1960s. It is written in the first person and has a confessional tone, since the hero is a sex-obsessed and bashful boy. It is dangerously funny -- had to put it aside to catch my breath from laughter on many occasions -- but also sometimes quite moving. It is so studded with Yiddish terms (British versions) that footnotes or a glossary would have been helpful, though the context made most of them at least guessable. Jacobson is a dazzingly gifted novelist. I feel some frustration because the raucous vulgarity of his material prevents me from recommending the book to everyone I know. If you can get past the outrageous grubby adolescent male absorption with Sex (!) that is at least the context for much of the story, however, the wonderful cast of characters and the sheer brilliance of the writing make this a marvelous read.

I received The Mighty Walzer for early review and had a tough time getting into it. It was well-written, but just didn't capture my attention. I was having flashbacks to all the novels I was assigned to read for English Literature critical analysis class. You know, the ones that are shining examples of literature, grammar, sentence structure, tone, era, voice but some how manage to be the most boring books on the planet. Yes, I could write a term paper on the book and can appreciate its literary worth, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed it as a source of entertainment. On the front cover it notes that fans of Phillip Roth will presumably like this author's style. I would agree. Unfortunately, Phillip Roth does not excite me either. There is some satire, but unless you understand Yiddish and British slang, this might make your eyes cross. I think the comedic relief was lost of me due to my limited understanding of the language. I discovered I'm just not that interested in reading pages about ping pong facts, plays, moves or strategies couple with rambling accounts of growing up Jewish in Manchester. I did put the book down, thinking that perhaps my mood would change on another day. Maybe I just needed to be in a more serious frame of mind to enjoy this read, but after pushing through another hundred pages, I was still rather bored and asleep.

I picked up this book because the picture on the cover and the blurb on the back made me think that this is a sweet tale of a young boy coming of age in post WWII manchester. But it's not sweet, it's bitter. Not even bittersweet. Just bitter.

To give you a clue, the "Sheeny" mentioned in the blurb is a dude, and their idea of sweettalking the ladies is "Well, go on, put it in your mouth." But of course more beautifully written. My 68 year-old mother will probably love it, but it wasn't what I was in the mood for. I wanted an Archie and Veronica tale. In a way this is very much an Archie and Veronica tale - if Archie got off on contemplating Reggie and Jughead doing Betty in tandam.

For what it is, it's brilliant. The words flow like poetry. It's hopelessly old fashioned in terms of it's misogyny, but I suppose that's the whole point. I would have probably liked it more if I'd gotten some sort of warning.

This book by Howard Jacobson was one that I read in a fairly quick time and enjoyed. It takes a male from before puberty through adulthood. Some of the adolescent events are very believable etc. The family portraits are believable also. The plot does not always follow a straight line for me but I found the book interesting to read.

J. Robert Ewbank author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"

The main problem for me was the extensive use of Yiddish and 1950s-era British slang -- there were just too many sentences where I didn't know or could only guess at what was being said. Also it's less about ping-pong than you might think from the blurbs. The assertion that it's "one of the greatest sporting novels ever" is mystifying. Still, it can be quite entertaining.

The incredible blurbs on the back cover of the book promise a book of great hilarity and insight. The bleak truth is that it contains very little of either. An obsessive self interest and self absorbtion drowns out any sympathy that you might want to give to Oliver Walzer. The star table tennis player schtick (borrowed from Forrest Gump) is extraordinarily tiring --you wanted to clout both central character and author with a racquet or something and have them wake up and talk about something else.
This is a shame because I thought the current hype around his latest book was genuine discovery of a new voice. I have enjoyed other books of his and hope that he regained some touch in his most recent novel.

This book is an absolute joke. And by that I mean it is hilarious. The life of the Mighty Walzer is something that has to be read by everyone. I mean, this guy is an absolute joke. I was laughing aloud the entire book, I couldn't put it down. I am a huge ping pong fan, so the book really struck a chord with me, and it made me reminisce about the good ole' days playing pinger (as my father and I called ping-pong) with my dad.
I am telling you, Howard Jacobson is an absolute genius. After reading this book I think Walzer should become a household name. What a joke!