A Novel

Barney's Version

The hilarious, devious and touching story of an unruly life - a wonderful novel made into a motion picture starring Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman.

Barney's Version belongs in the very front ranks of Jewish comic novels, a crowded field to begin with...Barney's Version is a rambling social satire, a breathless romp through the second half of the 20th century, and finally the celebration of a complicated and sensual life that is, if not well-lived, then certainly lived to the fullest

The funniest book of the year, and maybe the saddest...Mordecai Richler never [wrote] with greater voice or more puckish verve. Barney Panofsky is his mouthpiece, truth, lies and lousy memory are his aces, every card in the deck is a picture, every rasp shoots an arc of grievance: bile with style... You will love it, laugh with it, and treasure it

A delightfully curmudgeonly mock memoir, describing the life of one Barney Panofsky, a boozy Montreal Jew, from Paris atelier-bound aspirant to writer circa 1950 to present...An enticing, intelligent and bloody funny non-PC read

The novel is richly comic until its tragic end, when what has been a largely between-the-lines wisdom moves to the centre stage of a story that is ultimately about ageing and mortality

The narrator of Richler's new novel is as much a figure of satire as a satirist. He is a complex, endearing, at times plain frightening old reprobate and one of Richler's finest creations... Richler is magiserially in command of his material

It takes skill to produce a wildly funny, satiric virtuoso performance in the voice of a man unaware that he is on the brink of an abyss

An unflinching portrait of a man in decline. Barney Panofsky is one of Richler's finest creations. He smokes too many cigars, drinks too much whisky and has a life of dashed hopes to reflect on as he approaches old age. He is also the alleged murderer of his best friend- something resolved in a fine twist

Mordecai Richler was an acclaimed Canadian novelist and essayist born in Montreal in 1931. He won the Commonwealth Prize, the Paris Review Humour Prize, was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novels Solomon Gursky Was Here and St. Urbain's Horseman, and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He died in 2001.

Even Barney Panofsky's friends tend to agree that he is 'a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer'. But when Barney's sworn enemy threatens to publish this damning verdict, Barney is driven to write his own memoirs, rewinding the spool of his life, editing, selecting and plagiarising, as his memory plays tricks on him - and on the reader. Barney slides from crisis to success, from lowlife to highlife in Montreal, Paris and London, his exploits culminating in a final outrageous scandal.

Solomon Gursky Was Here

‘A rich, rude, eccentric saga about the Gursky dynasty that crossbreeds Jewish and Canadian myths and is full of splendid comic detail’ – Observer

The wit, depth and wickedness of this resonant novel suggest a happy synthesis of Dickens, Malcolm Lowry and Philip Roth... This is a very fine work

A rich, rude, eccentric saga about the Gursky dynasty that crossbreeds Jewish and Canadian myths and is full of splendid comic detail

Vast, chaotic, vigorously imagined and ambitiously freighted

It is passionate, it has a thickness of living about it, and it is made to blaze every now and then with an uncommonly fine bit of worldly wisdom, memorably delivered out of the side of the mouth

WINNER OF THE 1990 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1990 
 
Since the age of eleven Moses Berger has been obsessed with the Gursky clan, an insanely wealthy, profoundly seductive family of Jewish-Canadian descent. Now a 52-year-old alcoholic boigrapher, Berger is desperately trying to chronicle the stories of their lives, especially that of the mysterious Solomon Gursky, who may or may not have died in a plane crash. 
 
A rich, irreverent and exuberant comic masterpiece from the author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St Urbain's Horseman.

Mordecai Richler

My Canadian Album

'Canadians of my generation were conditioned to believe that the world happened elsewhere.' 
 
So at the tender age of nineteen Mordecai Richler left Canada to live and work in Europe. Now famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his comic novels - from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to St Urbain's Horseman, Cocksure and Joshua Then and Now - he writes here of the country which he once again calls Home: the country that indelibly shaped his life and honed his comic gifts. 
 
He takes us from Toronto bars to the Yellowknife Golf Club (devoid of grass) just below the Arctic Circle, from Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba ('On entering the legislature, one is immediately confronted by two enormous buffalo') and back to that fateful day when the Russians invaded and captured Canada's own national sport - hockey. ('Nothing was ever the same again in Canada. Beer didn't taste as good. The Rockies seemed smaller, the northern lights dimmer.') 
 
He makes us understand the tensions between French and English Canadians, the controversial (and, so far, failed) separatist movement, the pain and the hilarity of the language war (the day, for example, Montreal police seized a cache not of heroin or cocaine but of 15,000 Dunkin' Donuts bags - because they weren't bilingual).

Mordecai Richler

Books by Mordecai Richler

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