Ik snap echt niet waarom dit boek de Man Booker Prize 2010 heeft gekregen. Ik ben dat gezaag over Jews en gentiles ook wel wat beu ondertussen. Als je de wereld voortdurend opdeelt in joden en niet-joden, dan kan het niet anders of je komt uit op "gezaag" en "gezeik".Neen, dit boek heeft me echt ...
From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club...
Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist whose seminal work is a comic history titled "Five Thousand Years of Bitterness," recalls his childhood in a British suburb in the 1950s. Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His ...
Not funny, too self-obsessedHenry is so self-obsessively obnoxious that I:a)could never find his expolits funny; andb)wasn’t engaged enough to appreciate or be interested in the wry humour or even the insights that this intelligent author undoubtedly has.Which was a shame, because if he has been ...
But the moment he took off his jacket, sat at his desk and, with his usual methodicalness, began to move books and papers around, he realised how difficult this task—no, this sacred obligation—was going to be. His stationery drawer refused to open. The ink dried in his pen. In his mind’s eye he s...
Maybe something to do with those poor Greek flower-pickers reported rescued last week from the horticultural hell of Hayle. Or BBC2’s A Seaside Parish, transmitted concurrently with its series about the National Trust. The Seaside Parish in question is Boscastle in north Cornwall, itself a Nation...
I had inhaled the poison of their adultery in the gallery – sucked on it and emerged alive – but out on the streets Marius and Marisa were still far apart, orgiasts only in a future I’d been rearranging for them. If leaving things a week had been a bad idea for him, it had been a bad idea for her...
Six hundred, seven hundred, more? She thought she ought to count. The numbers might matter one day. One at a time the men were led, each with his hands tied behind his back, into the marketplace of Medina, and there, one at a time, each with his hands tied behind his back, they were decapitated i...
It meant that we missed out on being scrutinised by the pelican who guarded the beach. Before you could get to what else Monkey Mia had to offer, you had to pass the pelican. And if he didn’t like you you could kiss goodbye to the dolphins, never mind the monkeys.Although under normal circumstanc...
Chapter Three He took her to a trade fair. Fun? He’d show her fun. ‘We can drive or we can fly or we can get the train,’ he told her. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Harrogate.’ ‘Then let’s turn it into an adventure. Let’s go by train.’ ‘What you have to understand,’ he explained, over a Great North Easte...