Howard Jacobson‘s The Mighty Walzer has made its way to the United States 12 years after it was originally published in Great Britain.
Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last year for his novel, The Finkler Question, and so publishers obviously believe the state-side publicity from that accomplishment generated enough interest in his earlier works to have them shipped them over. They’re probably right.
Jacobson is a brilliant writer whose work combines humor with a healthy measure of Jewish identity crises.
The Mighty Walzer tells the story of Oliver Walzer, a boy growing up in Manchester, England in the 1950s whose family immigrated from Eastern Europe and has a hard time fitting in with the natives. He’s good at ping pong but he’s really shy around girls. Yep, it’s a coming-of-age story that’s loosely based on Jacobson’s own experiences.
It’s not giving anything away to say that Oliver Walzer does not become a world champion table tennis player. But, Jacobson told NPR, it works out better that way for the book:
“I think most novelists write about losers,” he explains, “We love losers, we’re not interested in winners. This would not have been a funny or touching novel had Oliver Walzer become the world’s greatest table tennis player.”
I guess we’ll just have to find out what really does happen to Oliver later on.
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