The Mighty Walzer
by Howard Jacobson
🏆 Winner of the 2000 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
Recommendations from our site
“The Mighty Walzer is certainly one of his best. It’s a novel about table tennis in the 1950s and is very autobiographical. What I love so much about it is that Jacobson has an eye for the folly of the sport but also for its grandeur. He has an ability to articulate the psychology of sport even at an amateur level. Even when it is being played at the local Allied Jam and Marmalade factory on a table in the basement where the ball keeps going behind stacked-up chairs or falling behind the stage. It was very evocative of my learning to play table tennis, and Jacobson has a rare genius for encapsulating the sociology of the thing.” Read more...
Matthew Syed, Journalist
