The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

 

This is an odd book.  It was long listed for the Man Booker prize in 2012, and it very much reminds me of 'The Finkler Question', which as a winner recently.  Ned Beauman is a young Jewish British writer, and Howard Jacobson is an older Jewish British writer, but their books have an oddly bitter and irreverant tone that is shared.

This book opens in Berlin in 1931, but it is not steeped in revelry followed by pain.  No indeed.  The protagonist in the novel is the hapless Egon Loeser, a theatre set designer who is indeed Jewish in Germany, but he is clueless about what is going on around him.  When he passes Nazis burning Jewish books he thinks it is performance art and throws a book on the pile himself.  He is obsessed with two things--getting laid, which he is serially unsuccessful at, and teleportation, which is only slightly less disasterous for him.  So while the book is set in a historically charged era, that has nothing to do with what occurs between the pages.  Loeser is a man who goes with the flow.  He is a creature of happenstance--not a happy one, but in many ways he is not unhappy either.  The book has an oddly adventurous tone, but one with an axe to grind.  I think the author has an original voice, and it is well worth readin to see if it speaks to you.