Imagine that Isaac Babels Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead caf where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired
strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the
unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski.
And who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the books frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee?
Fastovskis not telling and anyway, who cares.
This is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I havent had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardsons motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.
Piers Plowright
August 2008
