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Martyn Goff, in The Daily Telegraph, April 12, 1984:
I find it difficult to believe that " The Therapy of Avram Blok" is Simon Louvish’s first novel. It is so assured, so ambitious, and so brilliantly brought off that there must have been some trial runs at least.
Mr. Louvish was born in Glasgow but brought up and educated in Israel where he served in the army. He returned to London to attend a school of film technique. These facts are important: in this huge novel the author uses poetry, music, a playlet, charts, drawings, slogans, graffiti, maps and film techniques. It is important to add that none of these is just for effect: Everything contributes to the power and breadth of the book, even the fantasy at the end.
Blok is an anti-hero who spends time in and out of the Moses Klander Institute (for slightly mental patients). He also visits London:February, London. Sludge, frost underfoot. Nights of black chill to the bone. Days of monochrome grey drizzle, paralysing the brain, seizing up the heart. The flowerpots at the apartment house are empty. Perhaps the pussycats have croaked from the cold. Inside, on the TV scree, a fat, pink-faced fart warbles, fixing the frozen millions with the fishy ice of his stare. Gone, the pipe-smoking Wilsonian smirk. Arriba, Britannia of Heath.
Puns, jokes, allusions, political know-how and revelations, unforgettable characters and sheer unstoppable verve are all part of this stunning debut. “Outside, Jerusalem’s brief evening scarletly faded, the call of the muezzin choked off by a power-cut caused by a terrorist sabotage.” Once started, this book is irresistible.
The Jewish Gulliver – Gillian Reynolds, Punch, May 15, 1985:
Here’s a great fizzing parcel bomb of a book. Imagine a Jewish Gulliver’s Travels. Or a Candide from Jerusalem. While you’re at it, remember your Heller and Vonnegut for this is a modem political satire on an epic scale, guaranteed to offend and enrage, to make all save the most effete and illiterate roar and whoop and weep with laughter.
This is a first novel from Simon Louvish, born in Scotland, raised in Israel. He was a military cameraman during his Nation Service, went afterwards to the London Film School, made political documentary films, and now lives in Hammersmith, opposite the cemetery.
Avram Blok, his hero, is committed to a benign psychiatric institute at the start of the book. They said he was a Peeping Tom, he said he was looking for an old girl friend, the one he had admired from afar at school. Well, would you believe him?
Seven years later, to the day, back comes Blok, voluntarily, saying he is living in an alternative historical epoch, "in which Germany had been a wholly Communist state since 1923, Leon Trotsky had ruled Soviet Russia for 45 years, and Adolph Hitler and colleagues had escaped to the United States, where Adolph eventually became a Senator for the State of Illinois and his son later ran for President on a third party ticket."
We are taken over the seven years between. Naturally, though, we go back to the Europe of the 1930s and 40s, then on to Blok's beginnings, born on a plank in the galley of the illegal immigrant ship Inna Klein approaching the waters of Palestine. "Talk of the birth trauma." This is not, however, what you could call a linear plot.
One minute the muezzin's call is abbreviated by a power cut. Then, we are off with a luscious English blonde, archetypal'60s upper-class rebel consorting with revolutions from Paris to Johannesburg. Now were at a wedding on a kibbutz, then on to New York for life among the roaches and the makers of dirty movies. Blok spins in worlds of politics, philosophy and the problems of getting laid. All is manic confusion, paranoia. What's happening?
To get all of the jokes you would need to know a lot about a lot of things. To get enough of them to make you laugh for a year and think for longer you only need the energy to keep up with Louvish, although the memory of when it was you started to doubt other people's certainties comes in handy.
Louvish pegs such things out on the line. Here's capitalism, looking a bit holey, and Marxism, (as seen in our day,) no less tattered, Zionism needs, and gets, the irony at full steam. The style is packed, allusive, bubbling with gutter utterance, shiny with intellectual muscle. The jokes rain down on you. You live in Blok's world not just because the artful author has snared you there but because you know it as surely as you know your own nightmares.
As the world looks back 40 years to the end of the war in Europe and looks away every night from yet more pictures of refugees in Lebanon, what could be more salutary than a comic vision of the world in which all of this goes on happening? A true humorist restores proportion. Louvish, by creating a world pelted by perplexities of every size, does just that.
Punch Lines From the Rubble, David Finkle, New York Times Book Review, 17 November 1985:
Mr. Louvish makes his point that madness is the only and obvious way out for Everyman and woman – that, as the typeface pyrotechnics metaphorically suggest, the world has long since become certifiably nuts.
Mr. Louvish has created his novel with the zest and generosity of a grandmother making stuffed cabbage, and he’s also done it with the glint and intensity of a physicist bent on finding a new, fun way to split the atom. Into it he’s thrown high and low (mostly low) humor, bouts of fornication and masturbation (mostly masturbation) and coprophilia, a subplot having to do with the exorcism of a wild boar (Satan? Judas Iscariot?) from subterranean Jerusalem and, overriding all, a politically angry peroration of a sort the Jerusalem Chamber of commerce won’t be excerpting for tourism brochures.
Since aimlessness is at odds with dramatic and narrative drive, “The Therapy of Avram Blok” does have a sizable problem; meaninglessness must be hammered into more meaning than Mr. Louvish ultimately musters for a novel to accumulate suspense and power. Nonetheless, the book succeeds as the hilarious wail of a stand-up comic delivering punch lines from the rubble. Mr. Louvish has enough combustible talent linked with Jewish spiritual and kabbalistic compulsion to earn the comparisons with Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Swift that have come his way… The apposite adjective in the long run will most likely be “louvish.”
Bryan Cheyette in The Jewish Chronicle, April 26, 1984:
“The Therapy of Avram Blok” is not for those with a gentle disposition towwards their Jewishness… Blok spends most of the novel – or “phantasm” as it is accurately subtitled – in and out of this asylum and in and out of the Jewish state. Towards the end, the novel revolves around the pun of whether the Jewish state remains an asylum – that is a refuge – or is just plain lunatic… Not that “The Therapy of Avram Blok” is a story with a beginning, middle and end. More accurately, it is a timeless hodge-podge of memory, fantasy, history, graffiti, parody, and black israeli humour – Jewish jokes to make your hair curl – incorporated into a wide range of grotesque cartoon figures. At its best, this method subverts the moral certainties that louvish believes got us into this mess in the first place. In this way the novel’s manic form directly reflects the nature of the world’s madness.
Louvish’s incessant nihilism, however, can be hard going and self-defeating. The one certain realisation in the novel is that our history – on its present course – can only end in another Holocaust. But does this mean that the novel – itself – needs to auto-destruct? “The Therapy of Avram Blok” deserves a wide readership – if only for bringing Israeli street humour to England – but read it at your peril.
Clancy Sigal, Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, April 9, 1985:
… Simon Louvish’s book is an attempt to demythologise Israel and the myth of Israel, using surrealist techniques… It belongs to a Jewish heretical, even kabbalistic tradition and deals with the very real problem of the role of the eccentric or the individual in as collective and militarised a society as Israel’s… I really enjoyed the book a lot. I found it very hard to put down. If they gave Nobel prizes for books of unflagging energy, this would certainly be a contender…
Nicholas Best in the Financial Times, April 27 1985:
…The irreverent story of an everyday Jewish boy, stubbornly withholding his faeces as a child, serving unheroically in the Israeli army, sentenced to 28 days’ psychiatric observation in a Jerusalem clinic for making a few observations of his own through the bedroom window of Mr and Mrs Friedman.
There is no plot as such. The book begins with the drawing of a pig and a sonorous aphorism from a Chinese fortune cookie.
The result is highly intelligent and very funny – but also overwritten, ill-disciplined, unstructured and slapdash. Drawings of the inside of Blok’s brain have no place ina novel; nor to the feeble heiroglyphics of page 261. The author has been indulged by his publishers, perhaps because the task of editing this demonstrably talented work might easily have provoked a riot in the house.
From The Jewish Floridian, December 6, 1985:
Through a dense fog of tawdry pornography and disgustingly foul language, the frail outline of a sleazy story can be dimly discerned in this peculiar novel. The story, such as it is, turns on the sexual fantasies and escapades of a Jerusalem native, Avram Blok, who is the zany protagonist of this crack-brained book… This is a first book for the author, Simon Louvish, who makes unconventional documentary films and teaches at the London International Film School. His style of writing is directly derived from Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22” with echoes of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.” There are no time constraints and no notions of linear development.
Louvish writes as though he has never heard of beginnings, middles and endings. He tosses in special typography and unusual sketches to send his message – a message which is mysterious, ambiguous and esoteric. Marshall MacLuhan once taught us that the medium is the message. Louvish confounds both medium and message to deliver a satire which could easily win an award for obscurantism, obfuscation, ambiguity and abstruseness.Reader’s letter – Anthony C. Jones, of Birmingham – “the Greatest Fucking Novel Since the Creation of the Universe”. Click on image to enlarge.
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