Mr Rosenblum’s List

[Dilbertian]

Have you read this book? It’s described as charming, delightful, funny. I don’t find it funny, I find it heartbreaking.

I am a child of immigrants, one a Holocaust survivor. They never felt any drive to disappear, to appear less foreign or less Jewish. (Admittedly, they arrived in the 60s, not the 30s.)

I’ve been the token Jew, the curiousity, the entertainment. But I was aware of it, and could choose whether to play along or to refuse and switch things around.

I’m about 2/3 of the way through. Does it get better, less painful? Does Jack recognise what he is doing to himself and to Sadie? Does he find a compromise?

Ugh... I haven't read it, but just checked it out on Amazon and the 2-star reviews probably give you the answers you're looking for.

One of them ends with "The author bio says the author is a screenwriter, and the structure of the book follows classic Hollywoood screenplay models: three clear acts (set-up/objective; obstacles; resolution), an underdog protagonist, a race-against-the-clock timeline (will the golf course be finished in time?), tidy arcs of character development, and lots of tear-inducing self-revelation close to the end. Why did I notice or care about any of this standard carpentry? Because I wasn't being distracted by comedy."

So you might want to hang on for the tear-inducing self-revelation bit, or you might not 😬 It does sound pretty awful!

TBH I don’t find the standard carpentry of the construction dull. It exists for a reason and it’s a good structure. But the only person who could possibly find this story funny would be an anti-Semite or xenophobe. The story is not dull, just sad.

Maybe the reviewers never actually read it.

Oh, I only mentioned that because it promises some kind of "revelation" ... since you were asking if the story develops.

I expect you can relate to this review:

I bought this book mainly because the cover proclaims it to be "The International Bestseller", followed by a quote from The Times stating that it is "hilarious... (and) the movie is already on the way".
I am just over one-third of the way through the book and I am very much in two minds as to whether to pick it up again. I am finding it very hard going.
So I came here to find out if it was just me and whether other reviewers had similar problems - also to see whether it gets any better.
I'm happy to read that some other reviewers also found the plot very "jerky" and slightly hard to swallow. It is true that no time at all is expended on explaining how Mr Rosenblum went from being a poor Jewish refugee to suddenly owning his own extremely successful factory. However, chapter after chapter describes in heavy detail the intricate labor of constructing his own golf course, which I am finding really, really boring.
I too am not at all sure what part of the narrative to concentrate on. Every time I think I have found a focal point, the theme seems to shift to something else.
The very few sprinklings of German words (odd, considering that both he and his wife are German) sound as if they have been lifted from war films of the 1950s and 1960s. I don't think I have ever heard any German person (not even people of Mr Rosenblum's generation) actually use the word "Schweinehund", for example.
I really did want to like this book - the historical premise could have provided an excellent backdrop, the basic idea was good, and the potential for exploiting these into a really good plot with credible situations and characters could have created a novel very worthy of the review on the cover.
But I am not finding this book hilarious. I'm not even finding it slightly funny. I'm certainly not finding it "a light summer read".
At the most I'm finding it rather sad in some places, and extremely frustrating in others.