Böcker av Mordecai Richler

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 entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory--though not his bile--is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping . . .

In this beguiling collection of short stories and memoirs, first published in 1969, Mordecai Richler looks back on his childhood in Montreal, recapturing the lively panorama of St. Urbain Street: the refugees from Europe with their unexpected sophistication and snobbery; the catastrophic day when there was an article about St. Urbain Street in Time; Tansky's Cigar and Soda with its "beat-up brown phonebooth” used for "private calls”; and tips on sex from Duddy Kravitz.Overflowing with humour, nostalgia, and wisdom, The Street is a brilliant introduction to Richler's lifelong love-affair with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants.

Even Barney Panofsky's friends tend to agree that he is 'a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer'.

At the tender age of nineteen the author left Canada to live and work in Europe. In this book, he takes us from Toronto bars to the Yellowknife Golf Club just below the Arctic Circle, from Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba to that fateful day when the Russians invaded and captured Canada's own national sport - hockey.

WINNER OF THE 1990 COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1990Since the age of eleven Moses Berger has been obsessed with the Gursky clan, an insanely wealthy, profoundly seductive family of Jewish-Canadian descent.