Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - Branko Gorjup (review date winter 1999)


Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - Branko Gorjup (review date winter 1999)

Branko Gorjup (review date winter 1999)

SOURCE: Gorjup, Branko. Review of Barney's Version, by Mordecai Richler. World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 149.

[In the following review, Gorjup contends that Barney's Version is “Richler's most remarkable accomplishment to date, the work of a great master who has come to understand the pitfalls of writing, the incompleteness of the text.”]

With the publication of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz almost four decades ago, Mordecai Richler created a new hero in Canadian literature. American critic Warren Tallman saw Richler's creation as a latter-day Huck Finn, possessing a consciousness begotten in the seedy jungles of North American cities on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. These cities—Montréal in Richler's case—were characterized by Tallman as demonic parodies of a peaceable kingdom, presided over by urban Calibans. It was perhaps for this...

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