MARCH 2016 - AudioFile
An intriguing project that involves adapting Shakespeare into novel form has lured such A-list authors as Anne Tyler [THE TAMING OF THE SHREW], Margaret Atwood [THE TEMPEST], and Howard Jacobson [THE MERCHANT OF VENICE]. Narrator Michael Kitchen delivers a sharp-tongued Shylock, plopped down in suburban contemporary England. Kitchen’s Shylock is cunning, obsessed with his Judaism and anti-Semitism, and with his daughter’s rejection of their Jewish faith. Other characters include a wealthy art dealer, his wayward teenaged daughter, and Shylock’s own rebellious daughter. And, of course, there’s that pound of flesh to deal with. Kitchen’s performance holds listeners’ attention, and the writing is eloquent, but since the adaptation relies heavily on the original, the plot feels leaden without the Bard’s poetry to let it soar. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Jan Stuart
…[an] ebullient riff on Shakespeare…Jacobson's high-flying wit is more Stoppardian than Shakespearean…
From the Publisher
International Praise for Shylock Is My Name:
“[An] ebullient riff on Shakespeare... [a] blend of purposeful deja vu and Jewish fatalism…Jacobson’s highflying wit is more Stoppardian than Shakespearean, even amid rom-com subplots and phallocentric jests equally well suited to Elizabethan drama as to the world of Judd Apatow.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Jacobson… has delivered with authority and style… [a] deft artist firmly in control, offering witty twists to a play long experienced by many as a racial tragedy.”
-– The Washington Post
“Sharply written, profoundly provocative.”
—The Huffington Post
"The Shylock of the novel is ... a character in search of an author, or at least an author who will write him fully, fill in the blanks and give him a voice where once he was voiceless. And in Jacobson, after just over 400 years, he has found a mensch who has done—with considerable skill—exactly that."
— The Daily Beast
“Stimulating… Jacobson is ideally suited to take on ‘Merchant.’”
— The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“It is delicious…Jacobson is one of our finest writers.”
— Forward
“A funny and insightful reimagining of The Merchant of Venice…Jacobson is uniquely qualified to take on The Merchant of Venice.”
— The Miami Herald
“A serious comic masterpiece.”
–- The Spectator (UK)
“Supremely stylish, probing and unsettling…This Shylock is a sympathetic character... both savagely funny and intellectually searching, both wise and sophistical, intimate and coldly controlling… Jacobson's writing is virtuoso. He is a master of shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command.”
— The Independent (UK)
“Jacobson takes the play's themes - justice, revenge, mercy, Jews and Christians, Jew-hatred, fathers and daughters - and works away at them with dark humour and rare intelligence… This is Jacobson at his best. There is no funnier writer in English today. Not just laugh-out-loud humour, though there is plenty of that, including wonderful jokes about circumcision and masturbation. But a sharp, biting humour, which stabs home in a single line… This is one of his best novels yet.”
– Jewish Chronicle (UK)
“Part remake, part satire and part symposium, Jacobson's Merchant is less Shakespeare retold than Shakespeare reverse-engineered... in these juicy, intemperate, wisecracking squabbles, Jacobson really communicates with Shakespeare's play, teasing out the lacunae, quietly adjusting its emphases … and making startlingly creative use of the centuries-old playscript.”
–-Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Jacobson, with glorious chutzpah, gives Shylock his Act V, and the end when it comes is extremely satisfying… Provocative, caustic and bold.”
–- Financial Times (UK)
"Jacobson is a novelist of ideas... What is added to a great work in the rewriting? Do we need the argot of the 21st century because the original is now intimidatingly remote? [Shylock Is My Name] is a moving, disturbing and compelling riposte to the blithe resolution offered in the urtext."
— Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
“Jacobson treats Shylock less as a product of Shakespeare’s culture and imagination than as a real historical figure emblematic of Jewish experience—an approach that gives the novel peculiar vigour.”
– Prospect Magazine (UK)
“When Shylock and Strulovitch are swapping jokes, stories, and fears, the tale is energetic…a work that stands on its own.”
– Publishers Weekly
“The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth–like British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish themes….full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised.” — Kirkus
Kirkus Reviews
2015-12-07
A novelization of The Merchant of Venice set in contemporary England touches on foreskins, art collectors, athletes, and troublesome daughters. This is Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson's (J, 2014, etc.) contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which writers are asked to reimagine one of the plays. He opens in a cemetery where a wealthy Jewish art collector named Strulovitch is visiting his late mother and pondering the latest misadventure of his teenage daughter, Beatrice. Nearby, reading to his buried wife from Portnoy's Complaint, stands Shylock, transported (by Tardis?) from a script written under Elizabeth I to pages in the reign of QE II. The father of the play's rebellious Jessica agrees to be a houseguest of Strulovitch, which allows the men to wax angry and eloquent on obstreperous offspring, anti-Semitism, and, ultimately, what penalty one can exact from the randy Christian jock with whom Beatrice has run off. Playing Antonio and middleman between father and daughter is an obnoxious aesthete named D'Anton with whom Strulovitch has clashed over a Jewish art museum. D'Anton's partner in crude anti-Semitism is an inane version of Portia as wealthy socialite with a TV show in which she serves food and renders Judge Judy-type dispute resolutions. The legal gotcha here is supplied by Shylock, as both adviser and doppelgänger to Strulovitch, who is pondering a different pound of flesh. The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth-like British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish themes. It's hard to say whether his novel stands well on its own, as the play permeates it with quotes, characters, allusions, plot elements, and that touch of magical realism that imports every pound of Shylock in the fictional flesh. The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked—comic patter that pales amid the fine, thoughtful talk when his two heroes hold forth in this uneven effort.
