Been galloping through Shalom Auslander’s Mother For Dinner. Not sure if he’s been discussed on OTF before. It’s a rather OTT satirical farce poking the ribs of tribal ghettoism and identity politics, featuring a ‘Cannibal-American’ family based in Brooklyn, where the centrepiece of the plot is the many children are expected to eat their dead mum rather than bury her.
The author is an escapee from a closed Haredi community, so I can understand his frustration and kicking out at such cult-like tribes. The humour is very much in the dark secular Jewish tradition, with that love/hate of his background thing going on. I suppose he’d consider himself a liberal humanist of the ‘Only Connect’ variety, with Montaigne being the main philosophical reference point, and Kafka and Beckett as obvious literary heroes, but there’s a strong whiff of shock-jock libertarianism in there too. And it’s very funny.
It’s only his 2nd novel. I might try out his first, Hope: A Tragedy, which imagines a crotchety and foul mouthed Anne Frank still alive in old age and hiding in an upstate NY attic.
The author is an escapee from a closed Haredi community, so I can understand his frustration and kicking out at such cult-like tribes. The humour is very much in the dark secular Jewish tradition, with that love/hate of his background thing going on. I suppose he’d consider himself a liberal humanist of the ‘Only Connect’ variety, with Montaigne being the main philosophical reference point, and Kafka and Beckett as obvious literary heroes, but there’s a strong whiff of shock-jock libertarianism in there too. And it’s very funny.
It’s only his 2nd novel. I might try out his first, Hope: A Tragedy, which imagines a crotchety and foul mouthed Anne Frank still alive in old age and hiding in an upstate NY attic.
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