Barney’s Version (Mordecai Richler, 1997)

Barney’s version is a mock memoir of a Canadian Jewish hockey-loving TV producer who in his youth had pretensions of being a writer. It is famed writer Mordecai Richler’s last novel, and seemingly a condensation of all he cared about, rolled into one neat volume.

The manuscript is presented as if found by Barney Panofsky’s children after his death, completed with footnotes added by his son correcting errors and occasionally giving his view on Barney’s arguments. In that sense, this is a literary analogue to the hit horror movie “The Blair Witch Project” that came out a few year after this book. Richler must have had fun with the intentional errors and imagining the back and forth between the father’s writing and the son’s amendations.

The book retells Barney’s life, and is divided into three parts, each one named for one of his three wives. The first one recalls Barney’s “lost years” in his 20s an American in Paris (Canadians count as Americans in my world, anyway), the second one seems to make light of a certain kind of Canadian Jewish bourgeois type of family (from which the second wife is extracted). She is only referred to as “the second mrs Panofsky” and is never mentioned by name. It just so happens that at the wedding between Barney and his second wife, he meets and falls in love with the woman who will become his third wife (which I later found out is taken from the real life of this book’s author, whose name is Mordecai Richler, remember?).

The third wife is a radio personality, and at the outset of this book it is revealed that Barney is writing these memoirs to try to make sense of his wretched life, now that he in old age has been abandoned by his true love, the third wife. Also looming in the background is the death of an old friend, which may or may not have been by the hand of Barney Panofsky himself.

The book is expertly written, and full of humorous apercus, anecdotes and raunchy stories. Sometimes it is almost excessively raunchy. It is in its own way also a kind of history of Canada and Canadian politics, commenting on the bickerings between the anglos, the quebecos and the inuit. Maybe not so much commenting on the inuit, come to think of it, but anyway. Another area that is obliquely evaluated is what at the time of writing was called “PC”, or political correctness. Some of the rants on that topic seem prophetic, when viewed from the vantage point of 2020. I liked the phrase “writers of pallor”, which seems to have been conjured up by Richler to counter phrases like “people of color”, a term which is now in full swing in the millennial 20’s. I also recognize some topics that I have learned were in style in the American 90’s, like Benefit galas for various diseases, or life-prolonging coma documents. Most of these things I have gleaned from watching 90’s television, chiefly Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show.

This is the first book I read of Mr. Richler’s, and possibly the only one I am likely to read. I got a sense of his style and get the feeling that this might be his crowning achievement, literature-wise. I would recommend this book to those who take an interest in Jewish Canadian literature from the 90’s, or those willing to try. It is a prose style that lends itself to page-turning and the 400+ pages whooshed by in no time. It’s funny, too.

The Vegetarian (Han Kang, 2007)

A brutal read. Interesting to read a book with such an unusual manner of expression. That is probably partly due to the fact that it is written i Korean, but I assume that this book would strike regular Koreans as unusual as well. I like the conceit of letting each part of the book be narrated by a different character. There is a Canadian book about a marriage that is made with the same concept, only it is comprised of only two sides. It is about the two perspectives of a failing marriage, that of the man and that of the woman. If I recall correctly, I think it was also read from each sides of the codex, so that the woman’s version is read from one side and the man’s from the other side. But don’t let this slight digression dissuade you from continuing to take in my well-crafted review. I would sa that this book is not suitable for reading aloud. It is quite extreme in the opening chapter with the description of the wife as “ordinary” and “ugly” and so on. The premise of the book is that the wife decides not to eat meat, a kind of “grand refus” or Bartlebyeian protest. Her immedaite surroundings react to this decision with disdain. Later on in the book, it is revealed that she wants to become a tree, which is her idea of the ultimate form of existance. The whole story of wanting to become a tree is strongly reminiscent of the book Solange by finnish raconteur Willy Kyrklund. But, it seems upon closer reflection that mrs. Kang in this choice of story is inspired by Korean poet Yi Sang (1910-1937), rather than Kyrklund.

I wish also to point out that Kang succeeds in portraying the peculiar tensions of a psych ward, and also with the description of the main character’s mental instability. I stil don’t understand what a Mongolian mark is, though.

Coños (Juan Manuel de Prada, 1994)

This is a very unusual collection of vignettes relating to a certain part of the female anatomy. Each 1-2 page story describes, in quite explicit nature, various aspects of a particular woman’s nethers. It sounds like smut, but it is something other than that, really. The author, J.M. de Prada, a Spaniard, has quite the dirty mind, bordering on deranged in some stories. He is said to have been inspired by another Spanish masterwork, Senos, by Spanish escritor Ramón Gómez de la Serna in 1917. I was struck by the thought that after these to works the field is open for a third Spanish writer to put together an ode to the female backside – but about halfway through the stories, the narrator mentions he has already begun writing it.
The average story goes something like this – i) women of a certain job have something particular about their organs (e.g. seamstresses), then ii) some chauvinist musing over these particularities, reference to the narrator’s own sexual prowess, and then iii) the final sentence – often involving a put-down. This attitude annoyed me, and in my mind I conjured up a counter-volume, written by a woman, making fun of men and their anatomies. That idea has probably been tried, but I’m not especially keen on finding out, so I’ll leave it at that. Sometimes it feels like the author is just out to shock the reader, with references to various perversions, and a lot of the stories involve exotifying perspectives – which feels a bit off, considering contemporary notions of upstanding moral conduct. Nonetheless, he has a writerly talent, this Juan Manuel de Prada. I just don’t know if I care enough to seek out one of his real books.