Words keep sliding from Beryl Dusinbery’s memory. Or, she wonders, do they fly out of the bedroom window while she sleeps? She has lost track of how many sons she has and claims she doesn’t have enough fingers on which to count her dead husbands because she can’t remember them all, yet she remains a verbose and acerbic nonagenarian.
Former head of English at some of the best girls’ schools in the country, Beryl has an enduring love of words and becomes increasingly frustrated when she can’t summon them: “One minute she has a word, then she hasn’t. Where does it go? Rolled under the bed like the biscuits her day carer Euphoria brings her, balanced foolishly on the saucer of her tea cup?”
Beryl is belligerent and harsh towards both Euphoria and her Moldovan night carer Nastya (which she deliberately pronounces Nastier), while insisting that they stop referring to her as “Mrs Beryl” and demanding instead to be called Princess Schicklgruber. “Sometimes I fall just to give them something to do. Oops a daisy, I shout, sliding out of my chair.”
Unlike the princess, Shimi Carmelli forgets nothing, though he dearly longs to.
He has selective morbid hyperthymesia – a superior autobiographical memory – which he sees as more of a curse than a gift. Though in his 91st year, he retains the bashfulness of a boy. He works as a card-reading fortune teller at the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant on the Finchley Road where local widows fight for his attention and to hear what their futures hold.
“Among the Widows of North London, Shimi Carmelli is whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors – by which they mean the last man able to do up his own buttons, walk without the aid of a frame and speak without spitting.”
His uncle gave him a job in a shop where he read books on cartomancy and phrenology
Shimi is grieving for his estranged brother Ephraim – a sunny scallywag – who wanted, as a young man, to travel somewhere spacious, somewhere sunny. Shimi didn’t want space or sun – eternally ashamed of a childhood incident, he “meant to vanish, that was all. Down, down into the lonely dark.” His uncle gave him a job in a shop where he read books on cartomancy and phrenology and “unwrapped every new day as though it might go off in his face”.
Beryl and Shimi meet in the park that was once the burial ground for St John’s Wood Church where on a bench opposite an empty playground, the princess becomes aware of an elderly man in a fur hat who shoos a squirrel away with his foot. You stay in your world, she took this gesture to mean, and I’ll stay in mine; the sentiment struck a chord with her.
The wit and energy of this novel and its population of well-to-do elderly people bring to mind Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori. And as in that masterpiece, Howard Jacobson’s characters, far from being moribund, are as vivacious and boisterous as his writing. He feels that when comedy is put to a serious use some people are bothered by it; that in the literary world there’s an awe of the quietude of writing. He has no interest in writing a quiet book. “Comedy,” he says, “bursts into the quietude of writing.”
Jews make very good jokes . . . because we know life isn't funny
To be a Jewish writer is to be a funny writer, Jacobson says, though he himself has never been serious about his faith – he had a bar mitzvah but that was it. “Jews make very good jokes,” he says, “because we know life isn’t funny”.
Author of 16 novels and five works of nonfiction, including Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question, Jacobson writes with such eloquence that this reader/writer needed to consult the dictionary several times, but his use of language is never pompous or self-conscious; his words are always the perfect ones. Indeed, his writing is so dense and cleverly packed with wit that Live a Little deserves a second reading. This is a tender, irreverent and extremely funny novel. Jacobson feels that the joy of making art has no equal, and you can sense the pure enjoyment of his writing in every one of his clever sentences.
- Julia Kelly's latest book Matchstick Man (Head of Zeus) is out in paperback now.
