A gem of a memoir

I have read the book and enjoyed it immensely, but there was something ultimately more satisfying in hearing the author tell me the story. The emotion and emphasis Howard Jacobson displays, perhaps inevitably, gives this audio version of Mother’s Boy a whole new experience for the listener.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Entertaining listen.

Very much enjoyed the content and narration by the author. Great writing, both humorous and affecting. Prompted me to explore the authors novels.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

Honest & very funny

I listened to it over a couple of days. He has a wonderful voice. He is hilarious, self-deprecating. It's the nonfiction bildungsroman. In the style of John Peel, I'm going to play it again, immediately. He makes you believe that there's a novel inside you too! Loved this!! It's definitely not towguts miaowguts.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Utterly brilliant

This is beautifully read and utterly humbling in the quality of its writing.
I wish it would go and on…
And now, having read no other HJ in my life I will purchase and read more of his work.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

An intimate account of family.

As always, with Howard Jacobson, it's difficult to resist his invitation to get up-close and intimate with his feelings and with his emotionalism. I find it difficult to resist anyway, not least because I'm nosey. I like to overhear those things that shouldn't be overheard. Conversation and raging that are private, too intimate to share, too painful to disclose but not important enough to go to the trouble of concealing. A lowered voice, even whispered, sometimes coded, sometimes only mouthed, but never concealed. To get the gist of this book you have to listen hard and you have to concentrate whilst bending your ear toward the direction of the sound. The man, two seats behind you on a train, chatting into his mobile phone, the couple at the next table in a restaurant, their voices suddenly lowered to create some extra intimacy or some additional opaque screening. The temptation to overhear is irresistible, especially if you're like me, and have a very low irresistibility threshold. I get that from my mother!

Howard's mother cared. She cared about Howard unconditionally, his father was less generous or, perhaps less inclined to be generous. The grandmother, siblings, aunts, wives, lovers, girlfriends, family friends and associated associates are included - not all of them colourful and interesting characters on their own - but included to set scenes and to explain things that otherwise, would have rendered the emotionalism unexplained and its impactfulness incomplete in the imagination.

This is the overheard mobile phone conversation, but on speakerphone. The man, two seats behind on the train, technologically inept? Or an unselfconscious broadcaster of feeling?

'Mother's Boy', is a catchy title. 'My Mother's Boy', would have been better!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Benefits from being narrated by the author

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this audiobook.
As a would be writer, Jew and grammar school boy I empathised with Jacobson.
I felt the whole thing benefitted by being read by the author. Jacobson's irony, occasional sarcasm and world-weariness comes through clearly. His biggest criticism is often towards himself. He does not hold back in his opinions. He is certainly not a great fan of Wolverhampton!
This is a well written book that I would recommend.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

A wonderfully honest and entertaining memoir

I loved this book. Such honesty- that’s rarely seen in these memoirs. You love and dislike him just as he does himself, as he goes through the phases of his life. At the end there is a sense he is reconciled to the ambivalent feelings he experiences about himself, his parents, his significant others and his capability to write. I feel I’ll return to this and may even buy the book. He reads it well - it’s his story and he’s telling it for us the way he intended. Full marks from me!

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

The agony without the ecstasy

This memoir is abidingly interesting and excellently written. It is agonised, anguished and shot through with his maladjustment (essential for a writer according to Jacobson), tortured with self doubt (he was he says even a ‘failed baby’), loaded with both gargantuan ambition, and crippling shame…. As he says he came out ‘the wrong way round which includes being Jewish’ the latter being at the radiating heart of the memoir.
All these maudlin qualities are from uplifting but the whole memoir is incandescent with inner turmoil and incident. The relationship with his aggressive father, the conjuror, market stall holder, mender of everything., speaker of a superb mix of dialects is intensely vivid; his working-to-the-bone mother is not only the source of Jacobson’s love of literature and words but of real mother love, and her own thwarted desires of her youth to be a writer are heart-breaking.
There is tremendous wit in words and scenario throughout. The terrible Paris honeymoon is grotesquely comic in its awfulness and his father’s attempts to levitate a blow-up doll on one of his conjuring shows is magnificent. His analysis of what goes wrong in his life (lots of it) is self-deprecating and brutally honest and I warmed to him when he apologised to his first wife. Through all his time at Cambridge under the indelible influence of F.R.Leavis, through teaching and not teaching in places he hated (or loved and had to leave) burned the unconquerable but seemingly never to be fulfilled urge to write a novel. It’s like some terrible gnawing tumour he has to expel from his very being. (Finally Jacobson won the Booker and has written 16 novels but that’s outside this memoir’s remit).
It’s an unusually vivid recreation of an inner life. I loved his language and his literary references (he IS partly Pip from Great Expectations) and analyses. Jacobson is also a very good reader of his own work.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

3 people found this helpful

Beautifully written and beautifully read

Exquisite stuff. I think it became extra-special because of the narrator. Unlike most authors, Howard Jacobson is a performer here - no-one else could have done this justice. I loved it. A witty literary hug....

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful