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Avram Comes Up Trumps – New fiction by Norman Shrapnel, March 8 1990:
The Last Trump of Avram Blok is the sort of hold-all novel almost anything can go into, and most things do. Simon Louvish brings his much-travelled star to set in the West, though you still feel his correct address (as children used to write in their books when they had them) is London, England, Europe, the World, the Solar System, the Universe ...
And so on, and so on. School of Rabelais, you might say, topped up with William Burroughs. Louvish has a liking for great lists, putting you in mind of free Association games played on outlandish journeys. The travelling is cosmic enough, heaven knows,. yet you find yourself thinking more of, the Central Line (last stop Ongar) and what on earth, or beyond it, would happen if the exuberance switched off like a power failure, landing you for ever at Barkingside or Hanger Lane.
The fear passes. Things keep moving; the tube takes off among the tree tops; we find ourselves in an extended reverie, a brilliantly stocked databank, a decidedly un-commonplace book. What continuity the novel bothers to have derives from the cinema, with Louvish's camera eye eccentrically covering the world with documentaries, B-dramas and H-nightmares, bleeding chunks of news and history before homing on "this dull and drizzly land", Margaret Thatcher's Britain. It's a fat book, constantly struggling to get fatter. Can that vital fuel, its cosmic energy, hold out to the end? It can; it does.
Blok’s Buster – Martyn Goff, Evening Standard, 22 February 1990:
Simon Louvish’s new novel provides a bang-up-to-date, sizzling, Jewish, Gulliver’s Travels. This is his third book about Blok: Like the other two, it dances, scintillates, shocks, irritates and dazzlingly stimulates.
Blok is no longer in Israel. He has come to London where he takes a minor job in a film school. No detail of the school, of Hampstead or Willesden or of London bus routes is missing; detailed, too, is a splendid account of two worn trying to break into an American nuclear base. Time and again it is this
welter of detail, the speed and sheer energy of the narrative that lift Louvish into the class of Vonnegut or Heller.
The pages are spattered with humour: puns, doubles entendres, satire, wit, pornography - they are all here. Present, too, are the lists beloved of this author: on and on they go, sometimes for too long.
From England the action shifts first to NewYork, then to California. But always there is the nuclear threat. At Alamogordo, one of the protesting women from the English base is trapped in the centre of the testing grounds and dies in an explosion. Blok escapes back to England. After a spell living with the down-and-outs at Charing Cross, he returns to the film school, finally abandoning London for a village near Edinburgh where he works in a home for the physically handicapped.
But the plot is not important in a Louvish novel and the characters are created by lightning sketches rather than in depth. What counts are the words, the overwhelming Niagara of them that swirls and flows through the reader's senses, and the author's deep concern and compassion. This is not just the reading of a novel it is a searing experience.
Financial Times, Wendy Brandmark, March 3 1990:
Simon Louvish knows no fictional boundaries. The latest in his Avram Blok novels is a manic, lewd, hilarious journey through London, New York, Los Angeles and Israel during the 1980’s, the decade of despair. The hero, a disenchanted Israeli and ex-mental patient, is in self-exile from his “homeland,” more a state of mind than a place. He witnesses all the terrible and absurd events of his time, from the protests at a nuclear missile base in Vritain and an atomic explosion in the American desert, to the mass suicide of a religious sect in California. Yet he retains his now revolutionary values of justice and compassion, his faith that the meek, the poor and the deranged will inherit the earth.
Avram may be a passive misfit but his creator and mentor writes with mad energy and bravado, his language an assault on the complacent reader. Louvish is both a fabulist and a compulsive list-maker, piling detail upon detail until we cannot fail to make the right connections: so in The Last Trump of Avram Blok, he shows us the detritus of the “good life” in London, circa 1983, lists the settings of crucifixions past and present. And if the frenetic syntax, the quick scene changes make our heads whirl, well, that is Louvish’s intention.Imagination Comes Up Trumps – Frederic Lindsay, The Scotsman, 24 March 1990:
Like his eponymous hero, Simon Louvish served in the Israeli army and saw active service, came afterwards to London and worked in a film school. Life not always being than fiction, let's hope the London International School bears no more than a remote resemblance to its fictional counterpart. The Blok novels among their other virtues provide a case study of the way an imaginative writer transforms the experiemce he shares with others into something. individually rich and strange.
This third volume of the Blok trilogy finds Blok in flight from the moral ambiguities of the Middle East. As an ex-mental patient, he carries in his baggage memories of how Irving Klotskashes, king of the schlock movie, was deprived of his latest epic when the patients burned down the asylum. Arriving in 1983 London, he wanders the streets until by chance he comes on a Free Nelson Mandela demonstration outside the South African Embassy. Among the demonstrators, he recognises an old friend, an ANC activist in exile, who introduces him to a vivid subculture of highly politicised expatriates, among them fellow Israeli Asher Katzman.
Katzman, significantly again echoing Louvish's own career, has been a documentary film maker specialising in the places that give as much of the world as has one a bad conscience. (sic?) Now something of a spent volcano, he finds Blok a job lecturing at the precariously financed college where he works. Katzman’s voice dominates the book with great flowing diatribes against the Homeland, Thatcher’s England and the general human appetite for folly.
It is with Katzman that Blok sets out to cross the United States by Greyhound bus. On the way they meet Che Guevara, not dead all but just a fellow traveller lusting like the rest of the passengers after May and Dominique, specialists in bondage and light domination. Back in England, be falls in love with the idealistic lesbian Jaqueline Happenstance, and follows her to Greenham Common after a couple of bored American airmen have thrown her off a radar tower. A glutton for punishment, it is this same Jaqueline who will carry protest to home base by camping on site to prevent a projected nuclear test at Los Alamos. Led by a dissident Red Indian, Blok and Katzman turn np in the desert just in time, not that anyone will ever believe them, to witness the mushroom shaped cloud.
Lots of books try to be Rabelaisian by fake bustle and long lists, most are wearisome, their only merit being that you can turn them into short books by skipping the lists. The difference with Louvish is that most of the lists are funny and there isn't a dull page from beginning to end. An end which, incidentally, for the delectation of Scotsman readers finds our hero emerging from the belly of a whale in the middle of the Forth and glimpsing the old castle set up on its rock. "Your Jerusalem,” as the whale remarks with a grin.
City Limits Magazine, Lucy O’Brien, March 22 1990:
A skittish modern-day version of `The Divine Comedy'. Our hero, former Israeli documentary filmmaker lodged at a London film school, undertakes a bizarre quest that leads him from demonstrations at Cheetham Common to a cardboard box on the Embankment and finally a nuclear test site in the Californian desert.
Reading like a cross between 'Gulliver's Travels' and Groucho Marx, 'The Last Trump . . . ' is a robust, satirical look at the myth of the Wandering Jew, with Avram Blok confronting an interior as well as outer apocalypse. Mixing up samples of Foucalt, MOD briefings, bus routes, cuttings and slogans with straight narrative and film script methodology, Louvin has amassed a postmodern Jewish odyssey. People and their politics are often defined by their consumer durables (his list of items littering Cheetham (nee Greenham) Common include 'a specula, personal walkwomans and tambourines') in a style reminiscent of Armistead Maupin. In parts very funny, in others just wild and very sad ... And he gets City Limits' 'Heartlands' down to a T.
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