Telling a tasteless Holocaust joke, hearing it deflate, and diving into a tangent about his mother’s experience in a train car during World War II. As Avishai himself professes, the whole standup, Dov is “veering off an internal detour,” (109). Grossman’s writing allows you to hear Dov’s stand-up performance, feel its knee-jerk awkwardness, as if you’re there in real time. He’s masterful at the slow drip of information, the way something unabashedly, crudely, grotesquely true begins you start seeing the shape of something candid behind the veil of performance. But even translated, Grossman’s writing is uniquely profound - a poetic colloquialism. I recognize the weight a writer places on each word, constructing a sentence mindfully, like stringing together the pieces of a puzzle. I have to admit, I’ve always been hesitant of reading translated works. His works have also been translated into more than 30 languages. He’s one of the most renowned Israeli authors his novels and short stories have amassed a number of honors, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Sapir Prize, and others. As an Israeli myself, the sound of Grossman’s name is familiar in my household. A grotesque, circus-like exhibition of something human, something real.ĭavid Grossman is a master of this - transcribing the real onto the written page. Few audience members stick around until the end of the show, but Avishai - who ultimately recognizes that Dov is fatally ill who knew Dov but was unaware of his messed up history whose ‘job’ as a audience member is to report to Dov ‘what he sees’ in the man on stage - is one of the audience members who stay.

And while there are actual moments of magic, ones acknowledged by audience member Avishai, a retired judge and childhood friend of Dov, the show is mostly a crap shoot. Through a crisis of a comedy performance, Dov recaps the misery of his existence: his disordered relationship with his parents his loneliness as a child his life as that weird guy.

Over the course of his two-hour act, sprinkled with Holocaust jokes and ‘humorous’ stabs at the audience, Dov relates the battered tale of his life - what’s led him to his disturbed state, as a comedian today. Translated from Hebrew, this novel recounts the sometimes-magical-sometimes-excruciatingly-unsuccessful final standup of Dov Greenstein, an Israeli comic at a dive bar in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv.

Nobody characterizes that experience better than David Grossman in his most recent novel, A Horse Walks Into A Bar. That cacophonous cough when a pun doesn’t receive the laughing track that was anticipated.

That shifting in the seat when a joke falls flat. Most of us have experienced that nauseating awkwardness - the physically agonizing discomfort - of sitting through a comedy show that’s just not going right.

A horse walks into a bar review