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A Horse Walks into a Bar
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins
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A Horse Walks into a Bar
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Publisher's Summary
Winner of the International Man Booker Prize 2017.
Random House presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman, read by Joe Barrett.
The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart onstage - an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up and leave or boo and whistle and drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic - charming, erratic, repellent - exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.
A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking and breathtaking listen. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn't know whether to laugh or cry - and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he's been summoned to this performance.
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What listeners say about A Horse Walks into a Bar
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- ELIZABETH
- 05-10-2018
Engrossing
Basically, it is one performance by a stand-up comedian in an Israeli night club as he slowly disintegrates. Unusual premise and challenging scenario. Occasionally, the sheer intensity begins to pall, but then the author (and the comedian) will take a breather and the tension builds up all over again. The narrator is compelling and utterly believable.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- M. Tweedale
- 19-12-2018
Grossman is stuck waking in circles
A Horse Walks into a Bar is about a two-hour stand-up comedy act. The performance is a slow-motion car crash, and the book is an even slower version of it. The book recounts every word of every painful joke, even when a paragraph overview would suffice. This is a short book, but it could stand to be a lot shorter. The narrator describes the performance as threadbare, which is charitable. I'd also describe the narrator as threadbare, a vague sketch of a human being. He is a prop, existing only as our proxy to judge Dovaleh. An omniscient narrator could've served the same purpose and the story would barely lose anything. The narrator's interior life is too blank. For a man who professes not to like stand-up comedy or to understand it, he describes the performance with the trained eye of a fellow performer. As a character the narrator reads as entirely constructed. The audiobook suffers from having stories within stories. Joe Barrett has a certain way of speaking when he's the narrator, but he often slips into that same voice when performing Dovaleh narrating stories to the audience, especially when Dovaleh himself is a character within those stories. It's easy to forget these stories are being relayed by Dovelah at times.
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