Shylock is My Name: The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare) (Hogarth Shakespeare)

by Howard Jacobson

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life.

‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’

With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship ...

‘Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream’ Evening Standard

'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

• ISBN10: 0099593289
• ISBN13: 9780099593287
• Publish Date: 4 August 2016 (first published 4 February 2016)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Vintage
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 288
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name is another entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series (like Vinegar Girl), updating the just-mentioned The Merchant of Venice. This presents a definite adaptation challenge...while open hatred of Jews was common in Elizabethan England and Italy, where the play is actually set, and anti-Semitism is definitely still alive and well today, it's not really the same world we live in anymore after the Holocaust. There's some interesting ways you could go with the sentiments underlying The Merchant of Venice, probably most obviously anti-Muslim sentiment in a post-9/11 world, or any country with ethnic disputes over a contested border. But Jacobson chooses to set his work in modern-day England and keep the play's original dynamic in place. Not only that, he wholesale imports the original character of Shylock the moneylender himself.

During most of the book, it's unclear whether Shylock is a hallucination seen only by Simon, our protagonist, but eventually other characters interact with him as well. How exactly this works is never explained, which is confusing because Shylock is a pretty major character. Why Jacobson chose to gloss over this detail while including an entire section about Simon's failed first marriage to a Gentile woman is a choice I found confusing and kind of off-putting. What I found far more off-putting though, was Simon's relationship with his daughter Beatrice, which is at the center of the plot. He spends an awful lot of time thinking about his daughter's sexuality, whether it's the boys she's sleeping with (and whether or not they have a foreskin) or thinking about his daughter's body in ways that seem way too close to the line of impropriety for a father. I'm a reader who really looks for character-driven dramas, and none of the characters, including Simon, Shylock, and Beatrice were particularly well-developed or interesting.

Ultimately, I just felt like this book wasn't for me. And by that I mean that besides my own quibbles with the writing choices, it was very concerned with Jewish male identity, particularly as it relates to fatherhood. As a childless Gentile female, the long discussions between Shylock and Simon about their shared religion/culture and their struggles as fathers to young Jewish women were just things I have no frame of reference to appreciate or understand. Since that was a central conceit of the novel, I never connected with it and unless those are issues that are relevant or appealing to you, I can't imagine that many people would enjoy reading it. I pushed myself to read it as quickly as I could so I could move on to the next thing.