Catching Up...Howard Jacobson and David Szalay

     Well, it has been a long time since I last posted anything about my reading. On January 10 we flew to Australia to stay in the same apartment in Sydney that we rented in 2016, and we spent close to four weeks in Sydney before flying to Melbourne. We rented a car there and with the assistance of Agnes--our intelligent Sat-Nav, with the dulcet female voice--we found our way to Lorne at the start of the Great Ocean Road, a spectacular drive along the southern coast, which we followed most of the way to Adelaide, although we took side trips into the Grampian Mountains and, by ferry, to Kangaroo Island, finally approaching Adelaide through the wine-growing area around Hahndorf. We stayed several days in the palindromically-named Glenelg, on the wonderful coast to the south of Adelaide. Adelaide itself? A bit underwhelming.
     Not too much chance to read, and luggage limitations meant recourse to downloads from the DC library to my I-pad. One of these was "The Finkler Question," by Howard Jacobson, which explored what it is or isn't to be Jewish. Frankly, I do not recommend it unless this is a subject of some interest to you. I grew bored with it at about the half-way mark and abandoned it--or at least minimally skimmed it through to the end. I only down-loaded it because I searched for Jacobson in the DC Library catalogue, looking for his modern version of the Merchant of Venice, which the library did not have as an e-book. So I tried Finkler. Let's be fair to Jacobson-- he is a great writer. I have just picked up from the library the print edition of "Shylock is My Name," and a blurb on the back cover by Jonathan Safran Foer reads--"As the brightness of his brilliance is hard to look at, so is the darkness of his humor. I do not know a funnier writer alive."  And another blurb reads--"How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterization , and the penetration of his insight?" And, dear David, 'Finkler' did win the Man-Booker prize--so maybe the problem lies with you rather than Jacobson...
     So I will revert to Jacobson after reading "Shylock is My Name."
        I did read in Australia David Szalay's "All That Man Is," which was short-listed for the Man-Booker. It was published as a novel, but it is in reality a set of nine, superb short stories, with only the vaguest of connections between them: there is a direct, but minor, linkage between the first story, which concerns a seventeen year old English youth touring Europe and a distinguished retired English civil servant coming to terms with his life in his 'seventies. And there is a certain progression of subject matter. The first five stories reflect love and sex, while the next several are heralded by an Latin epigraph signaling a change from love to war. As a Danish investigative journalist is going to destroy a politician whom he has known and liked, he says to himself--'c'est la guerre.' 
     But publishing it as a novel was a stretch.
    The range of major characters runs from a Russian billionaire contemplating suicide to a French youth on a cut-rate holiday in Cyprus (or was it Crete?). And the locales and nationalities in these stories seem to have been deliberately chosen to stress a European context. Szalay is highly skilled writer, and I certainly recommend this book. Now...maybe the feminists among you may not take to it...