Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [0]
“Richler’s greatest achievement. … Ebullient, manic, over the top.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Barney’s Version is a personal paean that delights in skewering and roasting the self-righteous advocates of postmodern moral relativism. … Delivered as a fin-de-siècle preoration, Barney’s Version is embroidered with the savage mischief and gleeful scorn of Waugh and the downward spiralling grotesquerie of Bellow’s self-destructive anti-heroes.”
—Books in Canada
“Richler has never been in finer form. Hilarous and heart wrenching at the same time. … [Barney’s Version is] fast paced and beautifully written.”
—Ottawa Sun
“There’s every reason to love Richler and his new novel. It’s a satiric, laugh-out-loud book. It’s filled with good jokes and delicious observations. … There is also tremendous sympathy for the failures and ageing of the flesh, and the one great love affair that shapes Barney’s life. … Barney’s Version deserves more than one prize for its technical ingenuity and slyness of style.”
—The Financial Post
“A book of great humanity and humor — and nastiness. … A funny, wonderful novel which I would be very happy to see the winner [of the Giller Prize].”
—Toronto Sun
“All hail to Barney, … and to Richler too, whose funniest book in years may also be his most poignant.”
—NOW
“Funny, caustic and colourful. … An intimate and … moving exploration of the elusiveness of a moral centre in a man’s life. … [An] unfailingly entertaining novel.”
—The Windsor Star
“A feast of nonstop storytelling, and arguably [Richler’s] funniest book yet.”
—Maclean’s
“[A] triumph. … At once hilarious, poignant, satiric and elegiac. … Barney’s 30-year marriage to Miriam, their mutual love, and the two sons and one daughter they produce … are the novel’s heart and soul. … They are treated with the utter persuasiveness — the sympathy, the irony, the unique blend of comedy and tragedy — that is Richler’s great strength and that characterizes the book in its entirety. Barney’s Version has an embarrassment of riches, material enough to furnish lesser writers with several novels, yet woven here into a wantonly generous, seamless whole.”
—The Globe and Mail
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2010
Copyright © 1997 Mordecai Richler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 1997. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.
Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Richler, Mordecai, 1931–2001
Barney’s version / Mordecai Richler.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36738-9
I. Title.
PS8535.I38B36 2010 C813′.54 C2010-905166-1
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