"Shylock Is My Name" by Howard Jacobson is an adaptation of Shakespeares "The Merchant of Venice", relocated into our contemporary, post-modern world of plastic surgery and reality TV.

Jewish art collector Simon Strulovitch, father of a precocious daughter named Beatrice, meets Shylock, another Jew, on a cemetery. While they negotiate their Jewish identities - and we learn that Jewishness is interpreted quite differently by them - in profound conversations with each other and while Simon expresses his fear of Beatrice running off with a non-Jew she is introduced to Gratan Howsome, a soccer player who is not only not Jewish, but also twice her age and, if that wasn't enough, known for his nazi salute on the field, by Plurabelle who hosts a reality TV show and D'Anton, close friend of Plurabelle and Beatrice's lecturer at college.
In the course of the narrative, these remarkably distinct characters get interwoven with each other over the "pound of flesh" which, in Shakespeares original, is supposed to change hands and indeed did find a suitable equivalent in "Shylock Is My Name".

Jacobson, in my opinion, did well in adapting Shakespeares famous play. The language of "Shylock is my name" is not only appealing but also highly sophisticated and by transferring rather dusty practices of the Jewish religion - on which an actually not-so pedantic Jew insists - into today's post-modern environment Jacobson created a humourous and ironic account of the material - with which the playwright would certainly have been pleased.