{"product_id":"book-kolo","title":"Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead","description":"\u003cp\u003eImagine that Isaac Babel’s Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café 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.\u003cbr\u003eAnd 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 book’s frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski’s not telling and anyway, who cares.\u003cbr\u003eThis 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 haven’t had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson’s motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.\u003cbr\u003ePiers Plowright\u003cbr\u003eAugust 2008\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Findaway World, LLC","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49645401801008,"sku":"BDkolo","price":12.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/690412-kolo-Square.jpg?v=1742616844","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-kolo","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}