Joanna Kavenna
Paying It back
Shylock Is My Name
By Howard Jacobson
Hogarth Shakespeare 277pp £16.99
‘Only a fool would think he has anything to add to Shakespeare,’ Howard Jacobson writes. This remark was bravely cited in a press release from Hogarth, announcing a new series of prose ‘retellings’ of plays by Shakespeare. The first to emerge was Jeanette Winterson’s A Gap of Time, a witty retelling of The Winter’s Tale. Now Jacobson has retold The Merchant of Venice. Other retellers will include Jo Nesbø, Anne Tyler and Edward St Aubyn. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally startling about anyone ‘retelling’ Shakespeare; his plays have been refashioned in innumerable ways, from the prose adaptations of Charles and Mary Lamb, to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, to My Own Private Idaho, and so on. His influence is inescapable: Shakespearean cadences are integral to the English language, and thus you might say, Caliban-esque, that we have all been inducted into a variety of Shakespearean consciousness, whether we like it or not. The most a writer can do, as Lawrence Durrell said, is ‘pay back these socking debts with a tiny bit of interest’.
Enter Jacobson, who has been described as the ‘English Philip Roth’ or (by himself, presumably with a wry smile) as the ‘Jewish Jane Austen’. Much of Jacobson’s fiction, including his 2010 Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question, focuses on the lives of Anglo-Jewish men – his terms, not mine. He
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk