Kalooki Nights
-
- £4.99
-
- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘This book is Jacobson’s masterpiece’ Jonathan Freedland
'A work of genius' A.C. Grayling, The Times
Wild, angry and uproarious, Kalooki Nights is a darkly comic, timely novel of what it means to be human.
Max Glickman is son to an atheist boxer, Jack 'The Jew' Glickman, and a glamorous card-playing mother. Growing up in the peace and security of the 1950s Manchester suburbs, the word 'extermination' haunts his vocabulary and Nazis lurk in his imagination.
When his childhood friend Manny is released from prison, the tug of religion and history proves too strong to be ignored and Max must accept there is no refuge from the dead...
'Raging, contentious, hilarious, holy, deicidal, heart-breaking’ Sunday Telegraph
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 Chlo and Zo ). 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.
