Grim and gut curdling, but great writing and very compelling - this is a difficult book but a good book!

I struggled quite a bit with this book. It's not my usual sort of read. It's definitely worth picking up if you fancy something different.

Advanced Reader copy - Enjoyed this book, really opened my eyes and made me seek out other similar books to read.

with thanks to netgalley, the publishers and the author for this ARC

A horse walks into a bar is a dark autobiography about the life of David Gross, that I wished I could say I enjoyed reading but I didn't

This is very different to my normal kind of book which is perhaps why it took me so long to get into it. if I ever did really get into it at all. I can completely see its merit and why it won the Booker prize, hut unfortunately just not the book for me.

Set in an Israeli comedy club, David Grossman’s novel is not an easy read. It is bleak autobiography as stand up routine, with protagonist Dov occasionally lightening the claustrophobic mood with jokes. Powerful and unrelenting.

A truly unique book, this explores the life of a comedian as shown through his stand up routine at a comedy club. Enjoyable even despite the characters at times being despicable. A great read.

Very much not what I expected from a novel about stand ups. May be a good read for fans of David Nicholls The Understudy

I simply could not bear this book and had to DNF it after 50 or so pages. It was the line by line description of a stand up comic and their terrible, old-fashioned, sexist jokes that made me give up so quickly. I may have missed an absolute gem but it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Completely different to the usual genre of books that I normally read, but comething about this book attracted me to it. but not really sure what it was.
Found it reasonably enjoyable but still a bit "meh" about the whole thing.
Central character is an Israeli comedian.
Not for those easily offended with some risque humour and strong language.
Nonetheless don't regret reading it.

Set in a comedy club in a small Israeli town.this novel is a dark and compelling read. Dovaleh G is the comedian whose life story unfolds over the evening in a telling that lurches from humour to bitterness, from cruelty to kindness. His performance is unlike any comedy show the audience have witnessed and the reader has a similar disconcerting experience with this character who is, in turn, deeply empathetic and pretty horrible. A highly original work, and definitely worth reading.

This book is dark, so dark, and reading it I felt weirdly, I don't know...claustrophobic maybe? It's a weird experience reading this book and I'm really not sure if I liked it or not. It's a good book, there's no denying that, and it's so well written, but, BUT, sometimes I just really did not like it at all and it's so odd feeling this kind of conflicted. I can appreciate that it's good, but I'm not sure I liked it??

An incredibly unusual but creative book. By setting the story in one place with few characters, Grossman allows us to explore human interactions and human psychology in a highly fascinating way. I would recommend this book to others.

I wish i could have loved this book as much as so many other people seemed to.
But sadly for me this book was just retelling everything a lot of other books already talked about but sadly not as well as other books have done it.
It could be that i personally am not a fan of how the author structured this book. it just didn't work for me.
If you are interested in this book give the first handful of pages a try and see if the writing works for you and see if its for you or now.

This winner of the International Booker Prize is a challenging read about an unlikeable Israeli comedian giving the most important show of his life, with hints that it might be the last in his life.

It walks a very fine tightrope between the offensive humour of his jokes and the pathos and intrigue of his life story. Somehow the tension is kept throughout with a juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy.

Whilst the context is contemporary Israel and the legacy of the Holocaust, it’s not preachy: the battle is a personal one and it drives the story. I felt grateful at the end that I’d read it – it’s different to anything else out there and a worthy winner of the prize. Highly recommended.

I was interested in the premise of this book because I'd just watched Stewart Lee's 'Content Provider'. Part of the conceit of Lee's work is that he deconstructs stand-up comedy while delivering it, how it works, why it fails. A novel about a stand-up disintegrating on stage, sounded intriguing.

However, it didn't live up to the promise. Unfortunately, the performance of the comedian is neither funny enough nor dark enough to hold my interest (to be fair, it was always going to be hard, so much of a stand-up's act is based on the tension of being in the room with them). DNF

After this novel won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize its publishers, Jonathan Cape, offered copies via NetGalley for readers interested in reading it. My apologies for the late feedback, which was due to health issues.

The concept of this novel made me uncomfortable. Like its narrator, Avishai, who is talked into attending the stand-up show, this kind of comedy routine is not something I seek out. It makes me cringe a little even when depicted in film or television if members of the audience are singled out by the comedian.

Yet I found that despite this I was drawn in seeking to understand why Dovaleh was so intent on having his friend that he had not seen since they were fourteen present. It is a short novel and given the format of a single scene, even with flashbacks and asides, I found that I finished in a single sitting, carried along by the momentum of Dovaleh’s on-stage performance.

While I felt for Avishai, Dovaleh irritated me throughout and was rather miffed that the joke that forms the title wasn’t completed when Dovaleh drifted onto another subject.

It is always a bit of a mystery wIth literary prizes as to why one novel over another gains the judges votes. Here, while clearly the style was interesting, the narrative just didn’t wow me.

THRisnwinner of the Man Book International Prize is ideal for people looking for something different, raw and honest that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

I read a third of this book, and for such an acclaimed author, I saw no rhyme or reason to it. The story meandered, and the book seemed like an indulgence on the part of the author. So, I stopped reading it, as I felt I was wasting my time.

I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I’ve read a few translated books recently, and this has been one of the best translations I’ve read – a worthy winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
The book itself takes place over the course of one evening, with a few flashbacks interspersed. It feels quite stream-of-consciousness and must have been challenging to translate from the original Hebrew as it’s mostly a stand-up comedian on stage, told from the point of view of an audience member and old friend. The comedian seems to undergo a breakdown on stage, reliving childhood traumas under the guise of comedy, leaving the audience puzzled and shocked. It’s almost car-crash narration – you feel powerless to look away yet can’t help staring, and afterwards everything feels hollow.
It’s a beautifully written and translated book, very powerful, but not one to pick up for a bit of light reading. It will haunt you.