brilliant poet, confusing novelist. i suppose it makes sense in the end if you're not looking for anything concrete. ( )

Well, 'The favourite game' tells a big deal about the live of the Jewish protagonist Lawrence Breavman in Montreal and later on for a while in New York. We get to know some pretty strange incidents in Breavman's life, and his sometimes twisted sense of beauty respectively aesthetics and a even more twisted sense of fun or interest. Breavman is rebelling against a lot of things and displays a rather morbid attitude towards life itself for example when he drowns a rat, tries a surgery on a frog or accompanying a boy's corps into town.
This altogether twisted person becomes a rather famous writer during the novel even some sort of celebrity which he despises equally to everything else.
A major part of the novel is devoted to Breavman's sexual adventures with various women, but you clearly notice that he is seeing those women more like beautiful objects than as real living persons. Only his relation to Shell seems different, but in the end it just develops with his strange paths of thinking.
If you wonder about this rather confused summary, be warned, this is exactly what the book is like! It IS confusing, and not always clearly structured. Generally there is some sort of chronological timeline, which is every now and then broken by bits and pieces that do not belong to the current narration. While the plot continues, it is hard to tell how much time has passed, so you cannot clearly say, how old our protagonist is on various occasions.
The book is divided into several parts called 'book' which are also divided into several chapters. Since the narration is not continuous throughout those 'books' you may get the feeling, that some parts just don't belong where they are, or may have been introduced at a later stage. One book even deals almost entirely with Shell and her background, that was a bit of a surprise to me. But this shows the importance of the character of Shell within the story and for the protagonist.

Well, enough on that already.
As far as the language is concerned... it is readable, maybe a bit too much for my taste. We have some references to songs and even poems by the author himself, pop culture... and the like.
But I simply disliked the book. I disliked the protagonist, his world view, his attitude towards life, people, work, his arrogance and twisted way of thinking. I only liked some of the comments of the narrator who foreshadowed some events or addressed the reader directly. Which only happened in some of the later *books* - another discontinuety. Oh, and the length of the chapters varied considerably - when I started reading, is was already annoyed about the language and writing style, because it was stressed through those very short first chapters. ( )