β Scribed by Mordecai Richler
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Charged with comic energy and a steely disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney's Version is a major Richler novel, the most personal and feeling book of a long and distinguished career.
Told in the first person, it gives us the life (and what a life!) of Barney Panofsky--whose trashy TV company, Totally Useless Productions, has made him a small fortune; whose three wives include a martyred feminist icon, a quintessential JCP (Jewish-Canadian Princess), and the incomparable Miriam, the perfect wife, lover, and mother--alas, now married to another man; who recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early fifties, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens; who either did or didn't murder his best friend, Boogie, after discovering him in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his...
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Ebullient and perverse, thrice married, Barney Panofsky has always clung to two cherished beliefs: life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody else. But when his sworn enemy publicly states that Barney is a wife abuser, an intellectual fraud and probably a murderer, he is driven to writ
Welcome to the Puppy Place! Charles and Lizzie Peterson love puppies. Their family fosters these young dogs, giving them love and proper care, until they can find the perfect forever home. Lizzie Peterson is excited to watch her best friend Maria in an equestrian competition. As the horses get
As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God's existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked
Set around a timeline spanning from 1997 the main characters in the novel are Joe Carney and Az Ahmed who are each drawn from two distinct ethnic and social groups. Joe is a British born black man of mixed West Indian and English parentage and Azhad is a British born Pakistani Muslim. Their lives fo