Fragmented People

 Book Review

Title: A Horse Walks into a Bar

Author: David Grossman

Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen

Publisher: Penguin, 2016

Award: Man Booker International, 2017

 

Too many people have been burdened with the authorship of the sentence, “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” David Grossman, Israeli writer, presents the tragicomedy of Dovaleh Greenstein in this dangerously gripping novel.

Dovaleh G is what our hero calls himself. “Dovaleh, long for Dov, which is just like ‘dove’ except less peaceful, and G, like the spot, the apple of my dick.” That’s the protagonist’s self-introduction to his audience in a club in Netanya, a small town in Israel. He is both a thinker and a feeler. So his life has been both tragic and comic. But who sees the tragedy? He has been a stand-up comedian and laughter is what people associate him with. But a painfully fragmented heart is what he has been carrying around ever since his childhood.

His father, a barber, was far from being affectionate towards him. Families are not the best places to learn love from. “One minute they hug you, the next they beat the crap out of you with a belt, and it’s all from love,” Dov says recalling his father’s belt. “Believe me, Dovchu, sometimes a slap is worth a thousand words” is one of Dov’s father’s “jokes”.

Dov was not spared by his companions at school. ‘Hit the Dovaleh’ was one of their favourite games. “Nothing serious, here a slap, there a kick, a little punch in the stomach, the way you stamp a timecard. Have you hit your Dovaleh yet today?”

In order to escape all that torture Dov learnt to walk on his hands. He walked on his hands from school to home. You can’t hit a boy who walks on his hands because you don’t know where to hit or kick, you can’t make out where his face or stomach or any organ is.

But Dov never looked unhappy. On the contrary, he looked happier than the others, says the narrator who was his boyhood friend for a while. Avishai Lazar, the narrator, is a retired judge and has been invited specially by Dov to the present stand-up show. Why? To tell what he sees. Lazar is not interested but is compelled by Dov to attend the show. He wants to walk out of the show many times but is held back by a mysterious power. The same mysterious power holds us back too as we read this novel.  The audience in that club is like a bunch of hostages held by Dov whose show is far from being comic. He is narrating his own story. He stands in need of a catharsis which he is going to get by telling some people how “Man plans (and) God fucks him”.

Many from the audience walk out eventually. But most stay back because we all love to see God fucking other people. The temptation “to look into another man’s hell” is irresistible.  Grossman indicts us as much as Dov does his audience, however obliquely. We all love to hit the Dovaleh. We do hit. Come and see how. That’s what Dov tells Lazar and that’s what the novel tells us, the readers.

This novel grips us like an octopus with all its tentacles. Perhaps, this book cannot even be called a novel. It is something else. We may need a new genre to classify it. It has no plot. No character development. Not even dialogues in the traditional sense. And certainly no denouement. The fragments remain so at the end too – a little more broken perhaps. We are the fragments. “To be whole, it is enough to exist,” the narrator is reminded by his beloved writer. Is it?

 

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