Word: richler
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...Mordecai Richler...
...shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" inquires the psalmist. With reverence, replies Mordecai Richler. Plus a few gags ("What's black and white and brown and looks good on a lawyer?" "A Doberman"); a couple of philosophical digressions ("Liquor, once you're hooked on it, is a hard habit to break. Like God, Henry thought . . ."); some manic riffs on fame ("That dumbbell the Duke of Windsor he threw in the sponge for a tart. You want the Duke and Duchess for a charity ball, you rent them like a tux from...
...Solomon Gursky Was Here is far more than family saga. On the journey from rawhide to velvet, the Gurskys participate in nearly every event of global importance, from Arctic exploration to the rescue at Entebbe, from Mao's Long March to Nixon's Watergate. Despite the obvious temptations, Richler never reduces them to mere symbols of Jewish persistence or the Canadian past. Each member of his large and hilarious cast has three dimensions and at least two faces...
Then again, so does the author. Throughout a bright literary career -- most notably in St. Urbain's Horseman and Joshua Then and Now -- Canadian novelist Richler has employed a unique blend of humor, history and myth. Here his mixture is richer and darker than before. He is a ringmaster, making his performers do dazzling backflips without missing a beat. At the same time he is a moralist, recoiling from those who would sentimentalize the Holocaust or make power a sacrament. In the middle of the journey, Bernard Gursky seeks a biographer. "For this job," he booms, "I don't want...
This season, which ended last week, was typically eclectic. Among the offerings were a musical setting of Mordecai Richler's brash comic novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Composer Salzman's Stauf, an anagrammatical updating of the Faust legend co-written by Michael Sahl. The highlights, though, were The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a moving minimalist meditation by British Composer Michael Nyman based on a case history in Neurologist Oliver Sacks' best seller, and Harry Partch's 1959 Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a quirky blending of Euripides and Elvis Presley, scored for an unorthodox...