by David Grossman
Don't be put off by the title! This remarkable novel sat on my pile for nearly a year, even
though I am a great fan of the prolific, award-winning Israeli writer, David
Grossman, only because the title did not appeal. And the story line - one
night’s stand-up performance, seemed off-putting. Talk
about judging a book by its cover, and, as is usually the case, a huge mistake.
The star of the novel, a comedian well passed his prime, has
set out on this night to try to make things right for himself. Trapped in a memory that has haunted him and which, even at this late stage of life, seems unresolvable. Perhaps unforgivable.
He has arranged a
performance in a club in an outpost in Israel, the finale for a diminished career, and he has enlisted the support of a childhood
friend, now a revered, recently retired, District Court Judge, whom he asks to
come to this performance to serve as witness. But to what? And the judge
himself, mourning his wife, has come to question his own existence in the
larger world.
I knew all this time
that he wouldn’t let me get out of here easily. That the whole business, the
invitation and the ridiculous request, was a trap, his private revenge, a trap
I walked into like an idiot.
David Grossman knows how to weave a compelling story. What you might
call a tour-de-force in less than two hundred pages. If you haven’t yet read
“To the End of the Land,” start there. A masterpiece, featuring one of the most
poignant heroines in modern fiction. However, the two novels are so
completely different in style and content, you would never suspect they were
written by the same author.
HORSE… reveals a
difficult, deeply bonded, and also dysfunctional relationship with the
comic’s parents, a relationship that is tested one week at a summer military
youth camp. This is the place where the comic and the judge once crossed paths
and where tragedy struck – the defining moment of the comic’s life and,
surprisingly, in a far different way, also for the judge.
In addition to the judge In the audience the
night of the standup, there are the usual hecklers who demand humor not pathos, members of the
crowd encouraging the comic to examine the lifelong reverberation of that
summer, and a few who seem to have an interest in the comic’s personal reparation.
