Download Shylock Is My Name AudioBook Free
Man Booker Award champion Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to the modern reimagining of one of Shakespeare's most memorable character types: Shylock. Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and serious interpretation of The Vendor of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the type of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With quality irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, worried still with questions of identification, parenthood, anti-Semitism, and revenge. While Strulovich battles to reconcile himself to his princess Beatrice's "betrayal" of her family and traditions - as she actually is overly enthusiastic by the pleasure of Manchester high contemporary society and into the arms of the footballer notorious for providing a Nazi salute on the field - Shylock alternates grief for his cherished wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a stunning twist on Shylock's demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson's insightful retelling examines modern day, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identification while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent - a theatre that Jacobson himself considers to be "the most troubling of Shakespeare's plays for anybody, but, for an British novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging".
