- Hardcover: 202 pages
- Publisher: St Martins Pr (Feb 1984)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312151012
- ISBN-13: 978-0312151010
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,866,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Coming From Behind
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, definatly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Howard Jacobson is the author of six novels and four works of non-fiction. His last novel, The Mighty Walzer, won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Coming From Behind - a title which suggests definite Tom Sharpe oops-there-go-my-bloomers shenanigans. And indeed it does open with the main character Sefton Goldberg - who has all Jacobson's usual characteristics: Jewish (check) academic (check) and would-be writer (check) - in flagrante delicto, hoping he has locked his study door as his bare backside winks at the Yale lock and, he fears, any imminent visitor. But it's not about sex, or relationships, for once, or not primarily. It's a sort of hymn of despair to provincial academic life, all the great - or at least not proven otherwise - thinkers stranded in places like Wrottesley Polytechnic, where Sefton teaches, while hankering after a fellowship at Cambridge. The powers that be in the Polytechnic (and the existence of that term dates the novel already) have decided to twin it with the equally failing non-league Wrottesley Football Club, to save them all a bit of money and share facilities. The novel then flits back and forward with Sefton's past and present as he seeks to escape his dingy flat and dingy job. Coming From Behind shows Jacobson as a real writer's writer - a position which was once disparagingly dismissed as being akin to a gentleman's gentleman - with his half-page sentences, no care (or flair) for plot and determinedly unpopulist dialogue. It's no masterpiece but frequently funny and I found myself able to just bask in the flawless writing for pages at a time, flicking back in wonder at how damned consistently clever he is.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I struggled with this novel. Despite the quotations attesting to how funny it is on the cover, I found that I was dragging myself though its 250 pages. Why? Because Jacobson seems to be averse to dialogue which seems strange in a comic novel. There just seem to be massive passages of endless text which I found myself having to check whether they were the novel's present or back story because I wasn't paying attention. Dialogue lightens up a novel, surely what you need in a comic work?
Also, the continual pointing out that "...because he was Jewish" is tedious in the extreme. You'd guess someone called Sefton Goldberg was Jewish, or had Jewish ancestry as the very least, to have this qualifying what feels like every other sentence becomes almost patronising.
It's a shame that this gets the novel stuck in the mud. Jacobson's parade of characters are well-drawn and he creates a good sense of frustrated ambition and paranoia. I did laugh at Coming from Behind but I would have laughed a lot more had Jacobson not been so successful at writing the life out of it.
Also, the continual pointing out that "...because he was Jewish" is tedious in the extreme. You'd guess someone called Sefton Goldberg was Jewish, or had Jewish ancestry as the very least, to have this qualifying what feels like every other sentence becomes almost patronising.
It's a shame that this gets the novel stuck in the mud. Jacobson's parade of characters are well-drawn and he creates a good sense of frustrated ambition and paranoia. I did laugh at Coming from Behind but I would have laughed a lot more had Jacobson not been so successful at writing the life out of it.
Format:Paperback
The book is a fictional account of Jacobson's time as a university lecturer at the then Wolverhampton Polytechnic (called Wrottesely here) where he taught English for a while. I am sure that people who worked there at the time will enjoy a lot of the clearly in-jokes and trying to identify colleagues. For the rest of us it is perhaps not such a funny journey. Jacobson also has almost an obsession with the fact that he (and the main character Goldberg) are Jewish. not being Jewish myself I suppose it helps to perhaps understand more of what it means to belong to that particular group. But, Jacobson hammers home the point too often. As an insight into what it meant to be an academic, and the frustrations of not got the position one hoped for, it is interesting. As a comic novel however I don't think that it makes the grade (if you excuse the pun).
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A LITTLE LIGHT JACOBSON
A great introduction to Howard Jacobson. It is not too heavy, and is frequently very funny, as well as exercising all his familiar themes (although, as others have said, there is... Read more
Published on 4 Feb 2007 by Scribbler
Wonderful
This wonderful satire of academic life never fails to have me roaring with laughter each time I read it. Read more
Published on 8 Mar 2004
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