We have flashbacks, too, to the relationship between Lazar and Dovaleh. It's a master-stroke of structuring and it goes a long way to making Dovaleh tolerable. This shows us quite a different Dovaleh - uncertain, vulnerable, lacking in the comedian's chutzpah. As the comedian warms up his audience, this is intercut with Lazar remembering a phone call when Dovaleh got in touch out of the blue and asked him to come to the performance.

And who says you have to like all lead characters in fiction anyway? You simply have to be interested enough to stay with them.īut Dovaleh would be hard to take if the author hadn't interposed the early part of his act with flashback. Certainly, I didn't like him, but I liked the narrator's vulnerability towards him - which gives us a way in. So - to return to the point I began with - this softens Dovaleh's apparent loathesomeness. But Lazar feels a sense of responsibility for it. So Lazar narrates the action, watching Dovaleh perform his act, sensing Dovaleh's deep self-disgust behind the comedian patter. Lazar, now a retired court judge, comes along reluctantly, haunted by an event in their past. The narrator, Avishai Lazar, is a childhood friend who Dovaleh has tracked down and invited to his show. I think it's because Dovaleh is presented through a plausible, complicated lens of regret and sympathy. But somehow, I didn't find this offensive and I'm curious about why that is. Certainly he abuses the audience and tells off-colour jokes. Other reviewers have written about how they found the character of Dovaleh, the comedian, rather loathesome.

The concept of this is simple - a stand-up comedian at a comedy club in a small town in Israel performs his set, and gradually falls apart on the stage.

I can see why it won the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and there are elements which I am sure will stay with me but would I ever be tempted to read it again? I’m afraid not. I am not a huge fan of stand-up so I knew this book might pose a challenge for me. While the evening starts well enough for Dovaleh it soon deteriorates as his mind battles against his memories of the past which he cannot control or set aside. What we hear of the comic’s routine is interspersed with the thoughts that are going through the mind of his old friend, a retired judge, who he has invited along to observe the show even though they haven’t met for 25 years. The writing is very clever as you can almost feel that you are at the gig and the cameos of some of the audience are well observed. The novel is set in a bar in Israel and concentrates on the failing set of stand-up comic Dovaleh. I have very mixed feelings about this book as on the one hand I can appreciate that it is a very well written piece of fiction but on the other hand I can’t say that I actually enjoyed reading it. I was sent A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman to read and review by NetGalley

A horse walks into a bar review