St Urbain's Horseman - Mordecai Richler

Oh, how long since I had last read a Richler novel. Sure, my former Canadian teachers presented him as an awful human being (years before my time there, he came to give a guest lecture at our school and left everyone rather unimpressed), but in terms of North American Jewish writers for me he's right up there with Roth and Bellow.

St Urbain's Horseman doesn't have the epicness of Solomon Gursky Was Here or the comedy and mystery of Barney's Version, but it remains an impressive book. Large sections of the book are set in a London that I don't find too drastically changed in nearly 50 years. The parts about the legendary horseman are wonderful portraits of Canadian life in the first half of the 20th century, and the idea of him looking for Mengele (though not even the narrator actually believes that, probably) are the work of a genius.

Without the Jewish elements I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this book this much. But the fact is, the Jewish elements are very much there and so, unsurprisingly, this book is a winner for me.

Barney’s Version – Mordechai Richler

This book is the single greatest source of great North American Jewish anecdotes I’ve ever come across. While I liked Solomon Gursky Was Here better because of its epic family history, Barney’s Version is probably the better book.

Barney is, for want of a better word an incredibly charming son of a bitch, like probably the same Richler was. Readers (and women) are bound to love him and simultaneously wish they could head-butt him, mostly because you can’t let someone like Miriam (in particular if you picture her as Rosamund Pike, the best thing of the ok movie taken from the book) walk away.

We’ve all wanted to kill our best friends at some point in our lives (well, surely I have), but being accused of actually having done so and having to write some unreliable memoirs in order to clean one’s name is pretty heavy stuff...

Solomon Gursky Was Here – Mordechai Richler

Like my parents, I read this book the summer before I moved to Canada. It was one of the things that reassured me that I was making the right decision. Rarely have (fictional?) family histories been this epic and this well-written. True, Barney’s Version might be the better book, but Solomon Gursky is the more captivating of the two.

The richness of its anecdotes is something that I often think only Jewish North American writers can provide, with the characters showing the reader how to kill a polar bear and how to smuggle alcohol. The charm of Ephraim (Solomon’s granddad) reminds me of that of Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude. And whenever I see a raven (and I see a lot of them in London) I think of this book.

One of the few novels that I think I should re-read, pulling out the old family tree I had made for myself  11 years ago, and this time with a pen and paper besides me to note down all the wonderful anecdotes that I have now forgotten.