“There is no folly so particular that it doesn’t shed light on folly in general,” writes Howard Jacobson, and it might be his motto. In his Sunday columns in Britain’s Independent, as collected here, the quotidian is just a starting point for pondering the human condition.
While vacationing, for instance, he comes to the conclusion that “on holiday couples get to reacquaint themselves with one another and discover how little there is left to talk about.” A chance encounter with a 19th-century gravestone prompts Jacobson to ponder how a teacher who died at age 36 came to be memorialized as “a man greatly beloved.” At a bat mitzvah it strikes him, irreverently, that “being a rabbi is like being a literary critic: you pick at texts, affect a deracinated Central European accent and tell people how to live.”
Sometimes Jacobson reacts to front-page news, as when suicide bombings prompt the conclusion that “resistance, retaliation, revenge cannot ever be anything but a privileging of yourself.” More often, though, the novelist is vexed by transgressions against culture and language, as when he deplores “relativising knowledge for fear of privileging truth.” Addressing bureaucrats who think literature should ‘validate one’s identity’ and be ‘readable,’ he asserts: “A culture that can’t express its peculiar vitality without worrying how much upset it might be causing isn’t a culture at all.”
There are enough quotable one-liners here to deserve a chapter in Bartlett’s. “Purity has its attractions,” he remarks, “but only madmen live by it.” Or: “In war we can say what we cannot say in peace.” Another: “None of us think anyone else can see what we see.”
Some of his most affecting essays pay tribute to artists he admires: his friends Simon Gray and Harold Pinter, the poet and composer Leonard Cohen. Jacobson prizes the genius of Mozart as “the illumination of another way of seeing, the sudden turning of an action on its head, not to make light of it but to enrich it.” These surprising, witty, and enlightening aperçus of the human comedy by Howard Jacobson work the very same kind of magic.
Nonfiction
Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
- Review
By
– March 5, 2012
Bob Goldfarb is president of Jewish Creativity International.
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