What do you think?
Rate this book
The Mighty Walzer
From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves.
400 pages, Paperback
First published August 26, 1999
18 people are currently reading
686 people want to read
About the author
Howard Jacobson
76 books384 followersHoward Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews
August 25, 2023
A natural born player, that was Oliver Walzer, a natural born ping-pong / table tennis ball player from an early age where he used to use book covers for bats and still beat everyone! As Walzer grows up (in house dominated by women but also with an overbearing father in 195s Manchester), his balls drop, and pimples erupt and he finds out that he is anything but a natural born 'player' in the 21st Century use of the term, when it comes to the opposite sex he is shy, frightened, coarse and without any natural ability so why not take tuition and steers from his fellow ping pong players?
A somewhat at times meandering read that looks at the human condition narrated and from the view of Walzer as he follows his two biggest passions in life ping pong and women and ultimately gets limited satisfaction from either. Could be seen as a look at how we try to fill our lives with what we want and/or with what we're good at, and at how neither may necessarily be that fulfilling? I struggled to stay interested in this award winner read which is something I often find in big award winners, I either love then, or think 'how the hell did this win', this one if of the latter. An arduous 4 out of 12, Two Star read, that I really would have preferred more focus on the Manchester ping pong scene like the first fifth of the book did.
2023 read
A somewhat at times meandering read that looks at the human condition narrated and from the view of Walzer as he follows his two biggest passions in life ping pong and women and ultimately gets limited satisfaction from either. Could be seen as a look at how we try to fill our lives with what we want and/or with what we're good at, and at how neither may necessarily be that fulfilling? I struggled to stay interested in this award winner read which is something I often find in big award winners, I either love then, or think 'how the hell did this win', this one if of the latter. An arduous 4 out of 12, Two Star read, that I really would have preferred more focus on the Manchester ping pong scene like the first fifth of the book did.
2023 read
July 31, 2011
I received The Mighty Walzer for early review and had a tough time getting into it. It was well-written, but just didn't capture my attention. I was having flashbacks to all the novels I was assigned to read for English Literature critical analysis class. You know, the ones that are shining examples of literature, grammar, sentence structure, tone, era, voice but some how manage to be the most boring books on the planet. Yes, I could write a term paper on the book and can appreciate its literary worth, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed it as a source of entertainment. On the front cover it notes that fans of Phillip Roth will presumably like this author's style. I would agree. Unfortunately, Phillip Roth does not excite me either. There is some satire, but unless you understand Yiddish and British slang, this might make your eyes cross. I think the comedic relief was lost of me due to my limited understanding of the language. I discovered I'm just not that interested in reading pages about ping pong facts, plays, moves or strategies couple with rambling accounts of growing up Jewish in Manchester. I did put the book down, thinking that perhaps my mood would change on another day. Maybe I just needed to be in a more serious frame of mind to enjoy this read, but after pushing through another hundred pages, I was still rather bored and asleep.
May 6, 2015
This is a rollicking great novel brilliantly written and deserves a really great review not just one sentence. Northern British Jews without much money trying to make it big in the world and succeeding in very small ways.
November 4, 2011
The Mighty Walzer is a book about love, sex, and ping pong in Manchester; written with Jacobson's witty wordplay, wry humour, and abundant energy. An excellent, funny, engaging book; I would recommend this to fans of early Philip Roth, some of John Irving, Peter Carey, or Gary Shteyngart. Well worth a read especially if you liked any of his other work. I would also recommend Kalooki Nights, and of course Booker-winning The Finkler Question (which, despite all the hullabaloo is not really a comic novel at all, Jacobson just can't help being funny). You should also see him read if you ever get the chance, as brilliant and funny in person as he is on the page.
December 27, 2012
This was different than I thought. When I described this book to my husband, he said 'I feel like you've been looking your whole life for this book, like it was made for you'. And I had to agree. It was like the nerdy anthem that could become my theme song, a book devoted exclusively to ping pong--I even dug through my library-edition bookmarks collection to find the very nerdiest bookmark I owned to use while I read this book. And then it turned out be more of a coming-of-age story with ping pong as a trope, which is so...not a book about ping pong. It was a good book, very funny in parts, but just wasn't the anthem I was hoping for. And it was very, very Jewish. If you aren't very hip to Yiddish, you are going to have a hard time wading through this book, because it is stacked with Yiddish.
January 4, 2017
If you just told me what this book was about, I'm not sure I would have thought that I was going to like it as much as I did.
After all, at this point I'm pretty tired of coming-of-age stories. And, I know exactly zilch about ping-pong, and have exactly negative desire to learn.
Nevertheless, I loved this book. Loved it. I laughed out loud, not on every page, but often enough. In fact, i am still laughing when I think of a few of the things in it that cracked me up. Yet, the end almost made me cry.
As a result, because I am a sucker for the hilarious yet bittersweet, I pretty much now have an immense unrequited crush on Howard Jacobson.
After all, at this point I'm pretty tired of coming-of-age stories. And, I know exactly zilch about ping-pong, and have exactly negative desire to learn.
Nevertheless, I loved this book. Loved it. I laughed out loud, not on every page, but often enough. In fact, i am still laughing when I think of a few of the things in it that cracked me up. Yet, the end almost made me cry.
As a result, because I am a sucker for the hilarious yet bittersweet, I pretty much now have an immense unrequited crush on Howard Jacobson.
July 20, 2021
I debated a lot about this review/rating.
Were I to rate based on my enjoyment of the story and the perspective of the protagonist, it would be 2 stars. I don't like Oliver, I don't like his attitude or his world or even his ping pong career. If I ever met him I would try to leave his company very quickly.
Having said that, I have such powerful emotions and reactions to him because of the author's skill in creating personas and worlds. Having not experienced male puberty years myself, I can't compare with personal experience but I'm convinced this is an accurate insight into a teenage boy's mind. I can't flaw the writing or artistry at all, and that kept me going to finish the book, despite my disgust with many of the narrative's events. A voice and perspective I don't often read and I applaud the author in applying such skill and finesse in bringing Oliver to life. Five stars for perfect execution. Very deserving of its accolades.
But I'll never read it again.
Were I to rate based on my enjoyment of the story and the perspective of the protagonist, it would be 2 stars. I don't like Oliver, I don't like his attitude or his world or even his ping pong career. If I ever met him I would try to leave his company very quickly.
Having said that, I have such powerful emotions and reactions to him because of the author's skill in creating personas and worlds. Having not experienced male puberty years myself, I can't compare with personal experience but I'm convinced this is an accurate insight into a teenage boy's mind. I can't flaw the writing or artistry at all, and that kept me going to finish the book, despite my disgust with many of the narrative's events. A voice and perspective I don't often read and I applaud the author in applying such skill and finesse in bringing Oliver to life. Five stars for perfect execution. Very deserving of its accolades.
But I'll never read it again.
July 2, 2011
Howard Jacobson is a very funny man; a British man who is Jewish, or vice versa, I suppose. He has written this delightful, yet poignant, coming of age novel featuring Oliver Walzer as the protagonist and the narrator. The Mighty Walzer is a nickname Oliver Walzer deprecatingly gives himself as he looks at his life from the far end of the experience.
He begins with a laugh outloud funny description of his parents and both the maternal and paternal sides of the family. Both sides have very definite physical and psychological characteristics. His description of his dad as a young man is absolutely hilarious, and allows him to illustrate the illusion of "grandiosity" that characterize the Walzer men.
In Oliver's younger years his environment is dominated by females, since his dad is away at war. As a result he is incredibly withdrawn and quiet, but as he grows a little older he unabashedly shares with his readers his secret life in the bathroom creating his own porn by cutting and pasting the faces of his female relatives into racy magazines he has acquired on the sly. He is disgusted with himself in retrospect, but his description of this activity is, trust me, hilarious. He channels a middle school-age boy like nobody's business!
On the occasions when he is not in the locked bathroom he obsesses with developing his skills at ping pong, having found a ping pong ball in a nearby pond. His paddle replacement in his formative years is his leatherette bound copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He has no table, no net; just the wall, the ball, and his trusty book. His skills improve remarkably, but he is too shy to play with others til his dad takes him to the Jewish social center. Awkwardly, he makes friends with the other fringe dwelling boys who find their outlet in ping pong.
There are so many Yiddish words that one is tempted to get a Yiddish/English dictionary, except for the fact that the context clues are very helpful in translation. This book is funny to an English speaking gentile...I can only imagine how side-splitting it must be to the Yiddish speaking Jew!
This book was published first over 10 years ago in Great Britain, but since Mr. Jacobson won the Man Booker prize in literature in 2010 for a more recent novel, The Finkler Question, his books are finding new life and a new audience in the United States.
If you are in the mood for a funny coming of age novel set in Manchester England in the 1950's, or perhaps looking forward to reading ping pong strategy, skills, competition and equipment discussed by an author who knows his stuff, this just might be the book for you! Jacobson is an excellent and entertaining writer!
He begins with a laugh outloud funny description of his parents and both the maternal and paternal sides of the family. Both sides have very definite physical and psychological characteristics. His description of his dad as a young man is absolutely hilarious, and allows him to illustrate the illusion of "grandiosity" that characterize the Walzer men.
In Oliver's younger years his environment is dominated by females, since his dad is away at war. As a result he is incredibly withdrawn and quiet, but as he grows a little older he unabashedly shares with his readers his secret life in the bathroom creating his own porn by cutting and pasting the faces of his female relatives into racy magazines he has acquired on the sly. He is disgusted with himself in retrospect, but his description of this activity is, trust me, hilarious. He channels a middle school-age boy like nobody's business!
On the occasions when he is not in the locked bathroom he obsesses with developing his skills at ping pong, having found a ping pong ball in a nearby pond. His paddle replacement in his formative years is his leatherette bound copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He has no table, no net; just the wall, the ball, and his trusty book. His skills improve remarkably, but he is too shy to play with others til his dad takes him to the Jewish social center. Awkwardly, he makes friends with the other fringe dwelling boys who find their outlet in ping pong.
There are so many Yiddish words that one is tempted to get a Yiddish/English dictionary, except for the fact that the context clues are very helpful in translation. This book is funny to an English speaking gentile...I can only imagine how side-splitting it must be to the Yiddish speaking Jew!
This book was published first over 10 years ago in Great Britain, but since Mr. Jacobson won the Man Booker prize in literature in 2010 for a more recent novel, The Finkler Question, his books are finding new life and a new audience in the United States.
If you are in the mood for a funny coming of age novel set in Manchester England in the 1950's, or perhaps looking forward to reading ping pong strategy, skills, competition and equipment discussed by an author who knows his stuff, this just might be the book for you! Jacobson is an excellent and entertaining writer!
July 24, 2025
The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson, author of The Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/07/t... The Finkler Question
7 out of 10
The Finkler Question has been a delight to read in the summer of 2021, but somehow, maybe it is the weather (very cold these days, even if the outlook is in fact grim, because the planet is heating, and the past winter, well, not yet gone, actually, has been very mild, only some centimeters of snow, and a grand total of three, or four days with minus six degrees Celsius) or just the passing of a couple of years that renders reading good books more difficult, or anyway, engaging with them, most likely, it is a combination of factors which make me say reading The Mighty Walzer has been something of a fiasco…
We learn from The King of Comedy, Kingsley Amis, that fiasco comes from Italian http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/12/m... I mean, we can find that from the dictionary and other sources, but it is in his fabulous Magnum Opera that he takes a mirthful look at all kinds of aspects of life, in the most recent works I have read by him - How’s Your Glass is one http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/l... - the main subject is Drink
However, the fiasco is mine, mea culpa and let us just say that The Mighty Walzer is probably, nay, surely a very good book (experts have concluded, and you have to consult those who know, not amateurs that just throw words around, dismiss works according to their moods, plagued by insufficient education, a challengeable EQ, aka Emotional Intelligence indicator that is more important -twice as much I think I have read somewhere, perhaps in Emotional Intelligence, by the ultimate exert in the field, Daniel Goleman, http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/08/e... - than the traditional IQ) only I did not rise up to its level, or I was just not in the mood
From here on, the lines are not about The Missed Mighty Walzer, but some pointless reflections on what happened, why did I miss it, something maybe worrying, since this is more than a trend, it is a rule now, if the book is long – I was thinking to stop here and check how many pages does it have, for it is not really Anna Karenina– http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/a... at the same time, it is not that paramount either, glorious on the same level – then there is an overwhelming skepticism and the tendency, or now the obstinacy which will transfer hostility to the book and the author…why did you have to make it more than two hundred pages long, so that I abandon it?
Howard Jacobson was the first author first to get The Man Booker Award for a comedy, after The King of Comedy Himself, Kingsley Amis, has received it for The Old Devils http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/05/t... a novel that I am reading again (actually, this being an audiobook version, somebody is doing the reading for me) with gusto
Kingsley Amis made the joke, upon receiving The Booker Prize, saying something to the effect of ‘I have thought that the Booker Prize was not a serious award, but now I see that it is’, he did not use those words though, he was a gifted, glorious demigod, though I have been looking at a site https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/... just now, where one defends my role model, and another trashes him ‘From a literary standpoint, Amis would be a pale copy of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, let alone P.G. Wodehouse’ which proves yet again, how fickle (talk of the Finckler Question, ha) we are
Somebody places The King into the pit, while I see him as Icarus, somebody that has reached hallucinating heights, notwithstanding his shortcomings - Amis’s loyalty to the Crown was absolute...He even claimed to have had wet dreams about Queen Elizabeth II, all of which consisted of him throwing an eager hand upon Her Majesty’s royal bosom and her responding, “No, Kingsley, we must not’…He called Margaret Thatcher “one of the best looking women I had ever met” and compared seeing her in person to “looking at a science-fiction illustration of the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.
The Mighty Walzer thus might be placed by some well above say The Old Devils and prejudice, priming, bias are clearly at work – I have placed Amis on a pedestal and nothing and nobody can take him down, it is also a question of (distorted) values that are shared…The King of Comedy was a ‘Tory boozer, with a limitless taste for adultery’ and this is how I see myself, expect for the drinking part, which takes its toll only years apart, though having been enthused by the latest reads, on Drinking, I may start imbibing http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/l...
there is a fear that by engaging with something like The Mighty Walzer I may be missing out on a much better magnum opus, if not a new one, then something already enjoyed, and this is where Kingsley Amis offers more than twenty magnificent novels…the scope is not limited to him however, I have just started again to read Marcel Proust http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/u...
this is the Ultimate Chef D’oeuvre, nec plus ultra, crème de la crème, the zenith of sophistication and complexity, offering genuine surprises when taken again…I remember Proust and tend to refer to some of his verdicts, but generally, the feeling is one of melancholy, the chagrin experienced there, this is a drama, not a laughing matter, and yet, on getting reacquainted, I was stuck by the intense humor, the hilarity of some characters, like the Verdurins, preposterous, ridiculous, conflated, disingenuous, pompous…
they claim that their circle is the center of the ‘bon monde’, the others are boring and the real aristocrats, the comble of good taste, La Duchesse de Guermantes, is in fact…paying people to come to her soirees, when the opposite is true, it is impossible for all but the most noble to get there, and there are pages of laughter here, the absurd rules and claims, the pretsnsions regarding music, it is Pure Joy…
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
7 out of 10
The Finkler Question has been a delight to read in the summer of 2021, but somehow, maybe it is the weather (very cold these days, even if the outlook is in fact grim, because the planet is heating, and the past winter, well, not yet gone, actually, has been very mild, only some centimeters of snow, and a grand total of three, or four days with minus six degrees Celsius) or just the passing of a couple of years that renders reading good books more difficult, or anyway, engaging with them, most likely, it is a combination of factors which make me say reading The Mighty Walzer has been something of a fiasco…
We learn from The King of Comedy, Kingsley Amis, that fiasco comes from Italian http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/12/m... I mean, we can find that from the dictionary and other sources, but it is in his fabulous Magnum Opera that he takes a mirthful look at all kinds of aspects of life, in the most recent works I have read by him - How’s Your Glass is one http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/l... - the main subject is Drink
However, the fiasco is mine, mea culpa and let us just say that The Mighty Walzer is probably, nay, surely a very good book (experts have concluded, and you have to consult those who know, not amateurs that just throw words around, dismiss works according to their moods, plagued by insufficient education, a challengeable EQ, aka Emotional Intelligence indicator that is more important -twice as much I think I have read somewhere, perhaps in Emotional Intelligence, by the ultimate exert in the field, Daniel Goleman, http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/08/e... - than the traditional IQ) only I did not rise up to its level, or I was just not in the mood
From here on, the lines are not about The Missed Mighty Walzer, but some pointless reflections on what happened, why did I miss it, something maybe worrying, since this is more than a trend, it is a rule now, if the book is long – I was thinking to stop here and check how many pages does it have, for it is not really Anna Karenina– http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/a... at the same time, it is not that paramount either, glorious on the same level – then there is an overwhelming skepticism and the tendency, or now the obstinacy which will transfer hostility to the book and the author…why did you have to make it more than two hundred pages long, so that I abandon it?
Howard Jacobson was the first author first to get The Man Booker Award for a comedy, after The King of Comedy Himself, Kingsley Amis, has received it for The Old Devils http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/05/t... a novel that I am reading again (actually, this being an audiobook version, somebody is doing the reading for me) with gusto
Kingsley Amis made the joke, upon receiving The Booker Prize, saying something to the effect of ‘I have thought that the Booker Prize was not a serious award, but now I see that it is’, he did not use those words though, he was a gifted, glorious demigod, though I have been looking at a site https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/... just now, where one defends my role model, and another trashes him ‘From a literary standpoint, Amis would be a pale copy of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, let alone P.G. Wodehouse’ which proves yet again, how fickle (talk of the Finckler Question, ha) we are
Somebody places The King into the pit, while I see him as Icarus, somebody that has reached hallucinating heights, notwithstanding his shortcomings - Amis’s loyalty to the Crown was absolute...He even claimed to have had wet dreams about Queen Elizabeth II, all of which consisted of him throwing an eager hand upon Her Majesty’s royal bosom and her responding, “No, Kingsley, we must not’…He called Margaret Thatcher “one of the best looking women I had ever met” and compared seeing her in person to “looking at a science-fiction illustration of the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.
The Mighty Walzer thus might be placed by some well above say The Old Devils and prejudice, priming, bias are clearly at work – I have placed Amis on a pedestal and nothing and nobody can take him down, it is also a question of (distorted) values that are shared…The King of Comedy was a ‘Tory boozer, with a limitless taste for adultery’ and this is how I see myself, expect for the drinking part, which takes its toll only years apart, though having been enthused by the latest reads, on Drinking, I may start imbibing http://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/l...
there is a fear that by engaging with something like The Mighty Walzer I may be missing out on a much better magnum opus, if not a new one, then something already enjoyed, and this is where Kingsley Amis offers more than twenty magnificent novels…the scope is not limited to him however, I have just started again to read Marcel Proust http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/u...
this is the Ultimate Chef D’oeuvre, nec plus ultra, crème de la crème, the zenith of sophistication and complexity, offering genuine surprises when taken again…I remember Proust and tend to refer to some of his verdicts, but generally, the feeling is one of melancholy, the chagrin experienced there, this is a drama, not a laughing matter, and yet, on getting reacquainted, I was stuck by the intense humor, the hilarity of some characters, like the Verdurins, preposterous, ridiculous, conflated, disingenuous, pompous…
they claim that their circle is the center of the ‘bon monde’, the others are boring and the real aristocrats, the comble of good taste, La Duchesse de Guermantes, is in fact…paying people to come to her soirees, when the opposite is true, it is impossible for all but the most noble to get there, and there are pages of laughter here, the absurd rules and claims, the pretsnsions regarding music, it is Pure Joy…
http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u...
March 6, 2014
BABTNever fancied this author for some reason however R4 is flinging us this so I'll give it a go.
BBC blurb- From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde') he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion.
At sex he is not so natural, being shy and frightened of women. But with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis team, his game improves. And while the Akiva boys teach him everything he needs to know about ping-pong, his father Joel Walzer teaches him everything there is to know about 'swag'.
Unabashedly autobiographical, this is a hilarious and heartbreaking story of one man's coming of age in 1950's Manchester.
"Howard Jacobson won the Mann Booker in 2010 for "The Finkler Question", but this is his masterpiece."
hmmm - begone pure shite!
Produced by Clive Brill A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.
March 28, 2021
This is my second novel by Jacobson, and I'm in awe of his language and style. He outdoes Philip Roth in crazy adolescent sexualized fixation, going deep into it in ways that are hilarious and fairly disturbing at times. The family story, the inventive language filled with Yiddishisms and particularities to a Jewish community in Manchester of the 50s, and the exploits of a ping-pong boy wonder, are a kind of a magic show. However, as the boy becomes a man, and the reader follows his adventures, the misogyny becomes a constant element. The arc of the story seems mostly crazy adolescence (the best part), followed by a murky and selfish, brief and somewhat heartless prime of life, and a reflective old age section that reminds the reader that this character was never able to love others much beyond fantasy. I hope it isn't really autobiographical, and acrobatic as the writing can be, I'm not likely to seek another of his books for now.
January 12, 2016
Coming of age story of Oliver Walzer, descended from Jews who emigrated from Poland to Manchester and who eked out a living by their wits. Oliver is shy as a young boy and comes out of his shell by becoming a ping pong player extraordinaire and befriending his teammates who teach him of life. Narrated by Oliver who seems to always thwart himself, the bright star that refuses to shine - in fact insures that it won't shine. the story is laced with lots of Yiddish slang, a good bit of it not for polite company.
April 18, 2011
Really good, and the most superb ping pong novel that I have ever read. Better than _Finkler_ but not as good as _Kalooki_, on the Jacobsen-meter.
December 2, 2025
I really enjoyed this book but it's difficult for me to see how a gentile, or even someone Jewish who does not speak Yiddish & not born in North Manchester in the1940s/1950s/1960s could understand the book! For me, it was a walk down memory lane. All the places he mentions really do exist, except his school is fictitious - he really went to Stand Grammar School for Boys in Whitefield, and the Cambridge college he mentions is also fictitious - but this IS fiction!! The characters leap off the page, even though most of them are pretty obnoxious, including our main protagonist. It's a story of a pubescent boy trying to find his way in life, complete with all the crude graphic details of what teenage boys spend hours doing in the family toilet. It's a stream of consciousness, going from childhood to his late 50s. Moving&, somehow or other a page turner. Loved reading about my long forgotten haunts like Laps!
July 31, 2022
For the writing, 5 Stars. For the story...well, it is tough. And: WARNING-SPOILERS, sort of.
The story could have been about a kid with a natural talent for ping-pong. We could have followed him through travails and into triumph. Nope. Not happening. Instead, he takes the usual route, finding life has detours and, lordy be, sex. His emotional involvement with sex and life and his Jewish family sidetrack him. So instead of an extraordinary ping-pong player, we have a talented kid who falls off the pace. Another warning: keep paper towels handy in case the book begins to leak some of the spunk the kid delivers himself of albeit subtly. This is a funny, that is, humorous, book.
In lieu of such a glorious story, we get, at the end, a reunion of sorts after several decades of being away from the sport and the old buds. Meh.
The story could have been about a kid with a natural talent for ping-pong. We could have followed him through travails and into triumph. Nope. Not happening. Instead, he takes the usual route, finding life has detours and, lordy be, sex. His emotional involvement with sex and life and his Jewish family sidetrack him. So instead of an extraordinary ping-pong player, we have a talented kid who falls off the pace. Another warning: keep paper towels handy in case the book begins to leak some of the spunk the kid delivers himself of albeit subtly. This is a funny, that is, humorous, book.
In lieu of such a glorious story, we get, at the end, a reunion of sorts after several decades of being away from the sport and the old buds. Meh.
September 24, 2018
Mighty Good Book
Howard Jacobson's superb comedy is a chronicle of Oliver Walzer is really a coming of age set in Manchester England. It is very Roth and very good. You can see the amount of personal experience seeping through every character, incident and setting.
There is no question that, along with the Finkler Question, this is one of Jacobson's finest books. It leaves his more gentle works behind because of the granular savagery of the stories and the language. There is a lot of Yiddish in it, so the reader will have to be prepared. It is not remotely PC and all the more welcome for that. I would put this in the same place as Portnoy (though not as good), Jewball and Hope: A Tragedy. I love the ping pong scenes - worth reading for them.
Enjoy!
Howard Jacobson's superb comedy is a chronicle of Oliver Walzer is really a coming of age set in Manchester England. It is very Roth and very good. You can see the amount of personal experience seeping through every character, incident and setting.
There is no question that, along with the Finkler Question, this is one of Jacobson's finest books. It leaves his more gentle works behind because of the granular savagery of the stories and the language. There is a lot of Yiddish in it, so the reader will have to be prepared. It is not remotely PC and all the more welcome for that. I would put this in the same place as Portnoy (though not as good), Jewball and Hope: A Tragedy. I love the ping pong scenes - worth reading for them.
Enjoy!
September 16, 2018
A very good, humorous, engaging read. It's told by protagonist, Oliver Walzer, who as a man in his late 50s, recalls mainly his time as a young lad obsessed with playing ping pong and becoming a national champion. It's set in the 1950s, mainly in Manchester, England. Oliver recalls his upbringing in a household mainly filled with women. (His mother's sisters and his two sisters). His father isn't home a lot. Oliver is a shy lonely young lad who forms friendships through joining the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team. Oliver has no other sporting interests and reads a lot, going on to study literature at Cambridge.
An interesting, well told coming of age story.
An interesting, well told coming of age story.
September 24, 2023
The ping pong did nothing for me, however as a coming of age piece I found it humorous, sad, raw and heart rending in equal measure. The narrator is full of self loathing - not without good cause. He is not a likeable figure in any way, but is weak, self destructive, credulous and egocentric. But he also paints a bitter sweet portrait of a time, place and societal group where he is both proud and horrified by his Jewish context, relations and community.
The book was initially difficult to get into but it left me feeling sad at how easily we let slip things in life and how quickly things pass on.
The book was initially difficult to get into but it left me feeling sad at how easily we let slip things in life and how quickly things pass on.
January 8, 2020
This is a very well written and engaging novel. It is humorous and touching though the story does not develop in the way you would particularly expect. In a way that is part of this book’s brilliance, the main character is not pure, brilliant, or superhuman, but flawed and at times, frustrating. The life he leads is also littered with mistakes, imperfections, successes and failures. I did feel a sense of disappointment as the story came to an end.
Definitely worth reading and at times, inspiring, but you can’t help but wonder what might have been
Definitely worth reading and at times, inspiring, but you can’t help but wonder what might have been
June 10, 2017
Sad fun in Manchester
Yiddish sensibility soaks every page of this book. It's sad,funny, "grandiose," and humble pretty much all at once. It's a perfect partner for the author's Kalooki Nights. If you still remember how Philip Roth made you laugh when you discovered Portnoy's Complaint, then go wash your hands then read this book.
Yiddish sensibility soaks every page of this book. It's sad,funny, "grandiose," and humble pretty much all at once. It's a perfect partner for the author's Kalooki Nights. If you still remember how Philip Roth made you laugh when you discovered Portnoy's Complaint, then go wash your hands then read this book.
December 30, 2023
A fantastic book which mingles laugh-out-loud comedy with pathos as it relates the (semi- autobiographical) coming-of-age story of a young Jewish Mancunion boy who finds his path through table tennis. The writing is extraordinarily punchy, with a plethora of Yiddish terms and phrases along the way. Recommended.
April 1, 2021
I don't think I'm the target reader for this book, and I can't say I enjoyed it. The reviews saying it was 'laugh out loud funny' seem to have bene reading a different book. I liked the section before the finale but overall found it quite dull
November 3, 2025
A coming of age novel in Manchester with equal lashings of table tennis and being Jewish. Has its moments, but it is pretty vulgar at times. Had just enough interest to keep me going to the end, although at times I did wonder why I was sticking with it!
August 24, 2025
Three stars on this one – it was funny, sometimes, but on the whole not all that funny. Redeemed somewhat by a good ending but not enough to get to four stars.
September 21, 2025
I speak American English and there were a ton of terms I didn't understand, however this book was pretty funny and good coming of age story. Definitely a dude's book
December 22, 2025
Starts ok but could have ended half way and it would have been a better book.
December 13, 2012
Originally posted on my blog http://3throughhistory.blogspot.com
Ollie Walzer grows to dominate the Manchester ping-pong scene. Nothing special there, except that he's twelve years old. His people escaped a dreary existence as beet farmers on the Bug and Dniester valley in the Ukraine. The men - we'd call them luftmentshen, transliterated in Yiddish and not German, meaning people with stars in their eyes because their heads are in the clouds. The women - trapped, waiting for men to notice them, without the courtship rituals of thegoyish society to guide them. These women fill the Madonna role, long-suffering defenders of their honor.
Twink, Aishky, and Sheeny (!), the other core members of the Akiva Social Club table tennis team, Break Ollie into his teen years and the distinction between unserer and anderer. You can do anything you want with anderer, usually the goyish crowd, but God help you if what you do to, and with, unserer comes back to family and friends. And if one of unserer starts cavorting about, oy a schande! Evidently, the term "cognitive dissonance" only reaches Ollie's ears once he reaches Cambrdge.
This book is at its most convincing, for me, when Ollie, who tells his own story, is in the "outside" world. Ollie's growth into a master "ping-pong" player. Ollie's feckless attempts to sell as a barker in his father's traveling market. Ollie's furtive efforts to lose his virginity with a real girl. a silver artist/hippie chick who has the misfortune to be an unserer. Ollie's throwing a match at deuce because he finds himself to lofty to get down and dirty with the opponent who wanted the victory so badly. Ollie's aversion when he learns that the real reason he got into Cambridge was his sport, not his brilliantly constructed essays in support of misogyny.
But wait. That's not all. Ollie has a private life, one which would gross out the most salacious of readers. I'm not going to tell you his fetish, but let's leave it that his focus of attention while pleasuring himself would not win him any friends in the PC set. This is where Jacobson performs a masterstroke - he gives his first-person narrator a peccadillo that is so off-putting that, no matter if the character is himself with the name changed, nobody would believe it. Even a writer has some dignity, after all.
I ended this book feeling terribly sorry for the narrator. All of his choices, even the noble ones, sprang from a notion that he was The Mighty Walzer. But in that moment where he throws the match to someone who just wanted to win more, he decides that there is nothing mighty about him. Underneath, you wonder if he would have been happier just being Ollie Walzer, good person, scholar, mentsch, not The Mighty Walzer, living someone else's life, following someone else's dream.
Ollie Walzer grows to dominate the Manchester ping-pong scene. Nothing special there, except that he's twelve years old. His people escaped a dreary existence as beet farmers on the Bug and Dniester valley in the Ukraine. The men - we'd call them luftmentshen, transliterated in Yiddish and not German, meaning people with stars in their eyes because their heads are in the clouds. The women - trapped, waiting for men to notice them, without the courtship rituals of thegoyish society to guide them. These women fill the Madonna role, long-suffering defenders of their honor.
Twink, Aishky, and Sheeny (!), the other core members of the Akiva Social Club table tennis team, Break Ollie into his teen years and the distinction between unserer and anderer. You can do anything you want with anderer, usually the goyish crowd, but God help you if what you do to, and with, unserer comes back to family and friends. And if one of unserer starts cavorting about, oy a schande! Evidently, the term "cognitive dissonance" only reaches Ollie's ears once he reaches Cambrdge.
This book is at its most convincing, for me, when Ollie, who tells his own story, is in the "outside" world. Ollie's growth into a master "ping-pong" player. Ollie's feckless attempts to sell as a barker in his father's traveling market. Ollie's furtive efforts to lose his virginity with a real girl. a silver artist/hippie chick who has the misfortune to be an unserer. Ollie's throwing a match at deuce because he finds himself to lofty to get down and dirty with the opponent who wanted the victory so badly. Ollie's aversion when he learns that the real reason he got into Cambridge was his sport, not his brilliantly constructed essays in support of misogyny.
But wait. That's not all. Ollie has a private life, one which would gross out the most salacious of readers. I'm not going to tell you his fetish, but let's leave it that his focus of attention while pleasuring himself would not win him any friends in the PC set. This is where Jacobson performs a masterstroke - he gives his first-person narrator a peccadillo that is so off-putting that, no matter if the character is himself with the name changed, nobody would believe it. Even a writer has some dignity, after all.
I ended this book feeling terribly sorry for the narrator. All of his choices, even the noble ones, sprang from a notion that he was The Mighty Walzer. But in that moment where he throws the match to someone who just wanted to win more, he decides that there is nothing mighty about him. Underneath, you wonder if he would have been happier just being Ollie Walzer, good person, scholar, mentsch, not The Mighty Walzer, living someone else's life, following someone else's dream.
January 5, 2012
Well, call me derivative or simply lazy, but this novel really reminded me of "Under the Frog" by Tibor Fischer which I read a few months ago.
Both books pretend to revolve around the exotic wonders of a sport half-unknown to the British audience (basketball there, ping-pong here) and are set in the 1950s and both eventually take a long detour somewhere else.
Whereas Fischer aimed a bit too high with his sketch of Hungary and the 1958 Revolution, Jacobson decided to cope with a more familiar territory: Manchester, well actually the mostly Jewish neighbourhood of Manchester he grew up in. Which is nothing new as he did the same in the only other book by him I read so far, "Kalooki Nights".
And no surprises that the term "kalooki" pops up in "The Mighty Walzer" too, alongside with a whole lot of semi-yiddish terms washed in the Mancunian slang. Beware you readers of Isaac B. Singer, Abraham Yehoshua, Bernard Malamud and Jonathan Safran Foer because what you learned about some yiddish expressions such as "meshuggah", "schlomo", "shtetl", "bar-mitzvah" or "goy" won't save you here.
The truth is that Jacobson decided to add some spice to his story with the Jewish background of the sexual initiation and disillusion of life of his Oliver Walzer with an avalanche of tongue-twisting words that are not always self-explanatory because of the context they're put in.
- Have I written "sexual initiation"?
- Yessir.
- But hang on a moment: according to the Sunday Telegraph this is "the first great novel about ping-pong" and "one of the greatest sporting novels ever", is that untrue?
- Kind of, I'm afraid.
Let's rather say that Jacobson wrote his own "Portnoy's Lament", leaving the ping-pong bat idle for most of this novel and not always finding a decent substitute for it.
All that said, there are some good and a few very good things in "The Mighty Walzer". First of all, I should mention the brilliant part with Walzer attending Cambridge University. Well, this is very well written stuff: witty and merciless with that decadent Oxbridge life which I peeped and eavesdropped at (clearly out of my envy for not having studied there in my heydays). For a few pages Jacobson forgets his prolixity and yiddish-Mancunian patois becoming the satirist he doesn't manage to be in the rest of the book.
Alas! This sort of literary miracle happens only for a few pages.
But it's good to know that Jacobson could make it if he only wanted to.
"The Mighty Walzer" doesn't have that much to do with ping-pong and it's deinitely not a "sporting novel", but Howard Jacobson is able to get at least those ten points which make this novel worth a match.
It's all about spin, lads.
Both books pretend to revolve around the exotic wonders of a sport half-unknown to the British audience (basketball there, ping-pong here) and are set in the 1950s and both eventually take a long detour somewhere else.
Whereas Fischer aimed a bit too high with his sketch of Hungary and the 1958 Revolution, Jacobson decided to cope with a more familiar territory: Manchester, well actually the mostly Jewish neighbourhood of Manchester he grew up in. Which is nothing new as he did the same in the only other book by him I read so far, "Kalooki Nights".
And no surprises that the term "kalooki" pops up in "The Mighty Walzer" too, alongside with a whole lot of semi-yiddish terms washed in the Mancunian slang. Beware you readers of Isaac B. Singer, Abraham Yehoshua, Bernard Malamud and Jonathan Safran Foer because what you learned about some yiddish expressions such as "meshuggah", "schlomo", "shtetl", "bar-mitzvah" or "goy" won't save you here.
The truth is that Jacobson decided to add some spice to his story with the Jewish background of the sexual initiation and disillusion of life of his Oliver Walzer with an avalanche of tongue-twisting words that are not always self-explanatory because of the context they're put in.
- Have I written "sexual initiation"?
- Yessir.
- But hang on a moment: according to the Sunday Telegraph this is "the first great novel about ping-pong" and "one of the greatest sporting novels ever", is that untrue?
- Kind of, I'm afraid.
Let's rather say that Jacobson wrote his own "Portnoy's Lament", leaving the ping-pong bat idle for most of this novel and not always finding a decent substitute for it.
All that said, there are some good and a few very good things in "The Mighty Walzer". First of all, I should mention the brilliant part with Walzer attending Cambridge University. Well, this is very well written stuff: witty and merciless with that decadent Oxbridge life which I peeped and eavesdropped at (clearly out of my envy for not having studied there in my heydays). For a few pages Jacobson forgets his prolixity and yiddish-Mancunian patois becoming the satirist he doesn't manage to be in the rest of the book.
Alas! This sort of literary miracle happens only for a few pages.
But it's good to know that Jacobson could make it if he only wanted to.
"The Mighty Walzer" doesn't have that much to do with ping-pong and it's deinitely not a "sporting novel", but Howard Jacobson is able to get at least those ten points which make this novel worth a match.
It's all about spin, lads.
December 29, 2015
The theme of ping-pong threads through this story. But, in its way, it is peripheral to the narrative, much the same way that cricket is peripheral to Another Country. What we get is the story of a young boy, growing up both bound to and afflicted by his people. Family, Judaism (or the repudiation of it), the old country or the neighborhood are inextricable from who and what Oliver Walzer is. Delightful or repugnant personalities in the way of his friends, enemies, opponents, family and in-laws lend this book its particular spice. Oliver is as much a product of his background as the Queen of England and no less subject to its unwritten laws.
But what really shines through in this novel is the exuberance of Mr. Jacobson’s language. Incisive and occasionally bewildering metaphors and similes pepper this book, describing people, places, clothing, accents and slang with astounding variety and inventiveness. Mr. Jacobson is clearly in love with idiom and he slams it with the same verve that the titular character swings his paddles.
Where the book proves irksome, however, is its copious use of Yiddish slang. If you’re not Jewish or have no experience with the jargon, much of the sentences and paragraphs will prove utterly baffling. You can worm out the general gist by reading the context. But precise meaning may elude you.
No matter. True bibliophiles will find themselves absorbed as Oliver Walzer wanders from childhood into old age and ruminates along the way about life’s little vicissitudes and his own ambivalent attitude toward success.
But what really shines through in this novel is the exuberance of Mr. Jacobson’s language. Incisive and occasionally bewildering metaphors and similes pepper this book, describing people, places, clothing, accents and slang with astounding variety and inventiveness. Mr. Jacobson is clearly in love with idiom and he slams it with the same verve that the titular character swings his paddles.
Where the book proves irksome, however, is its copious use of Yiddish slang. If you’re not Jewish or have no experience with the jargon, much of the sentences and paragraphs will prove utterly baffling. You can worm out the general gist by reading the context. But precise meaning may elude you.
No matter. True bibliophiles will find themselves absorbed as Oliver Walzer wanders from childhood into old age and ruminates along the way about life’s little vicissitudes and his own ambivalent attitude toward success.
August 9, 2016
There's a lot to almost like in The Might Walzer and it's a novel I tried my darndest to like as well, but in the end I just couldn't make the leap. It's just too rambling, too random, and too full of subplots that never seem to go anywhere. The protagonist is bland. He's not likeable enough to root for, not dislikeable enough that you're waiting for his comeuppance. He's just there. The situations he's in just happen. There's really no narrative thrust throughout the novel, just a lot of "and this happenened, then this happened", etc.
As for the ping-pong, maybe I've been trained by other sports novels like Shoeless Joe and Fever Pitch to expect that if a book contains a sport, then the sport is meaningful to the plot, that there will be parallels between the game and life, that there will be life lessons. Instead, there's just ping-pong as something to fill the pages. It could have been any sport. It just seems so superfluous.
It's obvious that Jacobson has talent as a writer. The wordplay and pacing work quite well. But other than that, there is little to recommend this book.
As for the ping-pong, maybe I've been trained by other sports novels like Shoeless Joe and Fever Pitch to expect that if a book contains a sport, then the sport is meaningful to the plot, that there will be parallels between the game and life, that there will be life lessons. Instead, there's just ping-pong as something to fill the pages. It could have been any sport. It just seems so superfluous.
It's obvious that Jacobson has talent as a writer. The wordplay and pacing work quite well. But other than that, there is little to recommend this book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 61 reviews