Barney's Version
Authors: Mordecai Richler
Winner of the Giller Prize Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book Winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour
“Richler's greatest achievement. â¦Â Ebullient, manic, over the top.”
âLos Angeles Times
“
Barney's Version
is a personal paean that delights in skewering and roasting the self-righteous advocates of postmodern moral relativism. â¦Â 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.”
âBooks in Canada
“Richler has never been in finer form. Hilarous and heart wrenching at the same time. â¦Â [
Barney's Version
is] fast paced and beautifully written.”
â
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. â¦Â There is also tremendous sympathy for the failures and ageing of the flesh, and the one great love affair that shapes Barney's life. â¦Â
Barney's Version
deserves more than one prize for its technical ingenuity and slyness of style.”
â
The Financial Post
“A book of great humanity and humor â and nastiness. â¦Â A funny, wonderful novel which I would be very happy to see the winner [of the Giller Prize].”
â
Toronto Sun
“All hail to Barney, â¦Â and to Richler too, whose funniest book in years may also be his most poignant.”
â
NOW
“Funny, caustic and colourful. â¦Â An intimate and â¦Â moving exploration of the elusiveness of a moral centre in a man's life. â¦Â [An] unfailingly entertaining novel.”
â
The Windsor Star
“A feast of nonstop storytelling, and arguably [Richler's] funniest book yet.”
â
Maclean's
“[A] triumph. â¦Â At once hilarious, poignant, satiric and elegiac. â¦Â Barney's 30-year marriage to Miriam, their mutual love, and the two sons and one daughter they produce â¦Â are the novel's heart and soul. â¦Â They are treated with the utter persuasiveness â the sympathy, the irony, the unique blend of comedy and tragedy â 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.”
â
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.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
             Richler, Mordecai, 1931â2001
Barney's version / Mordecai Richler.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36738-9
             I. Title.
PS8535.I38B36 2010Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C813â².54Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2010-905166-1
The “Romeo y Julieta” trademark and design are reproduced and adapted by kind permission of Havana House Cigar and Tobacco Merchants Ltd., Toronto, the registered owner of the trademark in Canada.
“In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and “Lay your sleeping head, my love” from
W.H. Auden: Collected Poems
by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited.
Extract from
In the Fifties
by Peter Vansittart. Copyright © 1995 by Peter Vansittart. Reprinted by permission of Sheil Land Associates Ltd., and John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
Mairzy Doats
by Al Hoffman, Milton Drake and Jerry Livingston. Copyright © 1943 (Renewed) by Al Hoffman Songs, Inc., Drake Activities and Hallmark Music Co. International Copyright Secured. All Rights reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
“I think continually of those who were truly great” by Stephen Spender. Copyright © 1934 and renewed 1962 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
First four lines from “Howl” from
Collected Poems 1947â1980
by Allen Ginsberg (Viking, 1985). Copyright © 1955 and 1985 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of Frederick Warne & Co., and HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
v3.1
For Florence
,
         Â
and in memory of four absent friends:
         Â
Jack Clayton, Ted Allan, Tony Godwin,
          and Ian Mayer
ALSO BY MORDECAI RICHLER
NOVELS
The Acrobats
Son of a Smaller Hero
A Choice of Enemies
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
The Incomparable Atuk (Stick Your Neck Out)
Cocksure
St. Urbain's Horseman
Joshua Then and Now
Solomon Gursky Was Here
STORIES
The Street
ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass
Shovelling Trouble
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
Broadsides
Belling the Cat
Dispatches from the Sporting Life
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case
ANTHOLOGIES
The Best of Modern Humour
Writers on World War II
NON-FICTION
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
This Year in Jerusalem
On Snooker
1950â1952
1
T
ERRY'S THE SPUR
. The splinter under my fingernail. To come clean, I'm starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a first book at my advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilous charges Terry McIver has made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, a.k.a. Barney Panofsky's troika, the nature of my friendship with Boogie, and, of course, the scandal I will carry to my grave like a humpback. Terry's sound of two hands clapping,
Of Time and Fevers
, will shortly be launched by The Group (sorry, the group), a government-subsidized small press, rooted in Toronto, that also publishes a monthly journal,
the good earth
, printed on recycled paper, you bet your life.
Terry McIver and I, both Montrealers born and bred, were in Paris together in the early fifties. Poor Terry was no more than tolerated by my bunch, a pride of impecunious, horny young writers awash in rejection slips, yet ostensibly confident that everything was possible â fame, adoring bimbos, and fortune lying in wait around the corner, just like that legendary Wrigley's shill of my boyhood. The shill, according to report, would surprise you on the street to reward you with
a crisp new dollar bill, provided you had a Wrigley's chewing-gum wrapper in your pocket. Mr. Wrigley's big giver never caught up with me. But fame did find several of my bunch: the driven Leo Bishinsky; Cedric Richardson, albeit under another name; and, of course, Clara. Clara, who now enjoys posthumous fame as a feminist icon, beaten on the anvil of male-chauvinist insentience. My anvil, so they say.
I was an anomaly. No, an anomie. A natural-born entrepreneur. I hadn't won awards at McGill, like Terry, or been to Harvard or Columbia, like some of the others. I had barely squeezed through high school, having invested more time at the tables of the Mount Royal Billiards Academy than in classes, playing snooker with Duddy Kravitz. Couldn't write. Didn't paint. Had no artistic pretensions whatsoever, unless you count my fantasy of becoming a music-hall song-and-dance man, tipping my straw boater to the good folks in the balcony as I fluttered off stage in my taps, yielding to Peaches, Ann Corio,
1
Lili St. Cyr, or some other exotic dancer, who would bring her act to a drum-throbbing climax with a thrilling flash of bare tit, in days long before lap-dancers had become the norm in Montreal.
I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality. Or sensibility. At bottom, I am obliged to acknowledge, with a nod to Clara, the baseness of my soul. My ugly competitive nature. What got me started was not Tolstoy's
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
, or Conrad's
The Secret Agent
, but the old
Liberty
magazine, which prefaced each of its articles with a headnote saying how long it would take to read it: say, five minutes and thirty-five seconds. Setting my Mickey Mouse wristwatch on our kitchen table with the checkered oilcloth, I would zip through the piece in question in, say, four minutes and three seconds, and consider myself an intellectual. From
Liberty
, I graduated to a paperback John Marquand “Mr. Moto” novel, selling for twenty-five cents at the time in Jack and Moe's Barbershop, corner of Park Avenue and Laurier in the heart of Montreal's old working-class Jewish quarter, where I was raised. A neighbourhood that had elected the only Communist (Fred Rose) ever to serve as a member of Parliament, produced a couple of decent club fighters
(Louis Alter, Maxie Berger), the obligatory number of doctors and dentists, a celebrated gamblerâcumâcasino owner, more cutthroat lawyers than needed, sundry school teachers and
shmata
millionaires, a few rabbis, and at least one suspected murderer.