Middle-aged, perilously thin, wearing ripped jeans, red braces and cowboy boots “adorned with silver sheriff stars”, he starts telling bad jokes. Dovaleh – “Dovaleh G, ladies and gentlemen, AKA Dovchick” – takes to the mic in a small club in Netanya, Israel. Second, Grossman presents the reader with the difficulty of confronting and then coming to understand – and finally to love – the deeply offensive comedian who is at the centre of the story, Dovaleh Greenstein. As with all good parables, it requires the reader to do some work in order to understand its meaning. A Horse Walks into a Bar – again translated by Jessica Cohen, who has long proved herself capable of keeping up with Grossman’s twists and turns of style – is more like a parable, about the loss of parents and the losses of a nation. His previous book, 2014’s Falling Out of Time, a deeply personal portrait of the loss of a son, was like a prose poem more prophecy than novel. First, Grossman no longer writes what we traditionally think of as novels: he has transcended genre or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath.
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