In "The Greedy," his fourth book of prose, Jeremy Pincus dispenses from the blackest ingredients - serious illness, fear of death, elderly exploitation - a colorful show full of glitter.
The book is defined as a comedy - its subtitle is "Comedy from the Life of Artists" - but it would be more correct to define it as a farce.
There is no subtle, subtle, refined humor here.
It's a humor of absurd situations, bodily secretions and ethnic stereotypes, that does not try too hard to disguise its affection for the lower sides of life, but does so in all its brilliance.
The protagonist and narrator, Benjamin Bobek, a bohemian painter approaching the age of 70, is by all accounts in his last days.
But while he refuses to acknowledge his impending death and denies the growth growing in his womb, the smell of death - or the smell of money - rises in the noses of all those around him.
They circle around him in buzzing and plotting circles non-stop on his fertile legacy.
The result is a carnival of intrigue woven around the golem in the circle - the one who has no idea of anything and just wants to continue living just as he has always lived: to devour and hide and paint his last great work.
This is a carnival not only because of the hectic pace of events, or because of the jets of vomit that are splashed like confetti and the blood that has flowed like wine.
The origin of the term carnival is in the words Carne Levare, which in ancient Italian means "removal of the meat" - since in European Christianity the carnival heralded weeks of fasting and abstinence from bodily pleasures that came immediately after it.
But the meaning of the name also indicates that death, we were the future annihilation of the flesh, lies at the heart of the carnival celebrations of the flesh.
Bobek and a friend of his, who are celebrating the good life in Tel Aviv while immersed in Bobek's imminent death, live in a relentless carnival that mixes death and life - or in fact death and denial of death.
As Bobek explains: "Everyone is constantly banging on the drum to cover up the hain silence that is approaching us in cat steps."
Even the characters of the "greedy" are more reminiscent of carnival costumes than flesh-and-blood people: they have an almost arbitrary dimension.
The greedy entourage that surrounds the protagonist is a collection of deliberately flat cartoons: the diva actress, the argumentative lesbian oriental artist, the estranged and approachable writer, the hot-tempered Yemeni neighbor, and so on.
They are all stereotypes walking on two.
However, they all differ from each other only in the costume they wear, because underneath they are equally greedy and manipulative.
None of them reveal from the depths of the soul;
They all have only a surface - and are beautifully picturesque.
Here is how one greedy woman is described: "A thin, angular beast ... with a sunken cheek, a red nose leaking, the face adorned with small gray curls, gloomy, as usual - all sick", and another gentleman is: "Small stature - erect nose - small teeth - A cheap foreign wig is carelessly placed on the head. "
Nor does the narrator reveal much more about himself than the surface.
He is a Bon Vivant who on the whole wants to continue to live well even while he is dying, and with all his misery he has no particularly dark corners, except for the ridiculous contradiction between his repeated statements, "I am as healthy as a Belgian horse", and the bouts of coughing, vomiting, dizziness and falls. time after time.
In flat figures per se there is no defect.
Certainly not in the framework of such a Moliere-style comedy, which is not interested in exploring the depths of each of the acting souls but in a collective social patient, who touches almost everyone who belongs to the bunch of self-interested and fake artists surrounding the renowned painter Bobek.
Precisely this clownish spirit, so to speak, has the power to reveal underground social truths, in the spirit of Horace's statement Ridentem Dicere Verum, that is, to tell the truth through laughter.
But what truth is revealed through the clowning of the "greedy"?
That the artists are exploitative, greedy and manipulative?
That we're all like that?
Is this at all a hidden truth?
Is greed nowadays a shameful trait that needs comedy to hide behind, or is greed today a kind of sport and even a matter to be proud of?
Pincus slices in "The Greedy" a sharpened carnival farce steeped in punch jokes, bold dialogues and exclamation marks ("I have no intention of apologizing for this!") And verbal sweets whose very pronunciation causes palatable pleasure (how delightful to roll on the tongue "Sherpaulach", "," Eat "and" psychosis ").
His short, rhythmic style is sometimes read at a pace like Hamshiri: "I brought up memories - beat up some imitations of colleagues - we laughed to tears - we drank French cognac - we talked about the Kramazov brothers - I got sick - I retired to the bathroom - I vomited a bit."
Such a vigorous and joyful spirit is rare and refreshing these days in the landscape of our literature, which tends to the hesitant confessions, the drinkers of trauma.
But with all the brilliance of "The Greedy," his humor also has a blunt side.
It's not the kind of humor that shakes the strings, undresses us from all defenses, leaves us naked all of a sudden and brings us to peek aside, to make sure no one sees what the laughter has revealed.
It's witty and entertaining humor, gloomy and somewhat grotesque - but not dangerous.
He plays with stereotypes familiar to us from countless previous cultural sources - from the shaggy town Jews of Mandalay selling books through Hanoch Levin's chronic defeatists, to the embarrassing and expected exaggerations of borax films - and the fact that things are so familiar to us also dictates the nature of our laughter.
We laugh at these greedy people twice: the first time because they are pathetic, and the second time because we already know them, and their pathos is an integral part of us and the Jewish-Israeli culture as we know it.
Their greed is not threatening, it is domestic and family, maybe even national, and Pincus' comedy certainly does not seek to condemn or mock them, but only to remind us that we all, in the end, belong to the same joke.
Jeremy Pincus / The Greedy, Crown, 280 pages
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