Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level.
Like all of [Jacobson's] work, The Finkler Question has a kind of energy that you have to look at through your fingers, like an eclipse. As the brightness of his brilliance is hard to look at, so is the darkness of his humour. I don't know a funnier writer alive Jonathan Safran Foer How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? The Times On this form, Jacobson has better claims than anyone to be called the greatest novelist working in Britain today Mail on Sunday Sentence by sentence, there are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms Daily Telegraph
Title: Zoo time
Subtitle:
Contributors:
By (author)
Howard Jacobson
ISBN 13: 9781408831823
ISBN 10: 1408831821
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 1/09/2012
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Modern fiction
NBS Classification: General & Literary Fiction
Dewey Classification:
823.914
(DC21)
Format: Paperback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm