A Guide to the Perplexed, by Gilad Atzmon, trans. Philip Simpson

Peace in the Middle East, reflects Gunther Wunker in his memoir-within-a-novel, is "like the fantasy of the naked woman revealed through the glass of the peephole. As is known today to every peepologist worthy of the name, the worst fear of every peeper is realisation of the fantasy ... Mourners by candlelight [after Israeli prime minister Rabin's assassination] are just jerking off into the void."

Wunker (the name says it all) is born in Israel in the Sixties and soon starts fantasising about becoming "a decorated and irritating Israeli pioneer. I'd also developed a powerful urge to die in Israel's wars."

Experience of the army soon shatters his military ambitions, and sex makes him realise there are good reasons for staying alive. German women become a particular passion: "There's nothing more wonderful than the gorgeous, full-bodied, ash-blonde Aryan chick, gagging for it."

Wunker realises that his "beloved homeland was lurching on a zigzag course towards ... annihilation". An ugly scene towards the end has him watch Israelis die, "dying without dignity, dying without honour. On one level I was amused, on another I was deeply grieved." His memoir and his papers appear with a Preface, dated 2052, by a professor from the German Institute for the Documentation of Zion – an organisation devoted to deciphering "the collective intellectual regression that led [Israel] to destruction".

As a viciously black satire on Israeli life, A Guide to the Perplexed is grandiose, childish and nasty, but with just enough connection with reality to give it a certain unsettling power. The original Hebrew edition was well reviewed in much of the liberal press in Israel, so who am I to be offended?

Unfortunately, Wunker also has a long series of dreary sexual adventures. He creates the science of voyeurism or "peepology" (cue feeble jokes about academia). We get to hear about his deep relationship with a plastic sex doll, and another with a woman so awash with vaginal juices that "making love to her without a lifeguard standing by was ... hazardous". He offers recipes for chopped liver and proposes "statutory rape-days" as a way of breaking the ice between Arabs and Jews.

Those who still thrill to the pages of Sixties underground "comix" may find some of this amusing, however laboured. Yet even those semi-sympathetic to its politics will find it cheap and "provocative" in the worst possible sense. Gilad Atzmon has been deservedly acclaimed as a master of the jazz saxophone and clarinet. His writing, alas, represents a completely false start.