The Finkler Question

Posted on 13 February 2018 by Howard Jacobson

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they ve never quite lost touch with each other or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czechoslovakian always concerned with the wider world than with exam results Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor s grand, central London apartment It s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends losses And it s that very evening, at exactly 11 30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. Best Read eBook The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson – kino-fada.fr According to the reviews on the back cover, The Finkler Question is hilarious The front cover proclaims that it won the 2010 Man Booker Prize A reviewer from the London Times asks How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterization and the penetration of this insight I dunno how exactly, but I did not lose myself in admiration of Jacobson while reading The Finkler Question.Two friends of Julian According to the reviews on the back cover, The Finkler Question is hilarious The front cover proclaims that it won the 2010 Man Booker Prize A reviewer from the London Times asks How is it possible to...I ve always been suspicious of the Booker Prize a solid, stick in the mud reward to literary doggedness and middlebrow worthiness that guarantees reading matter for the leafy home counties if nothing else As a Nobel Prize lite it tends to award writers for what they mean rather than what they write Howard Jacobson s The Finkler Question has a central question that falls perfectly in the Booker court what is Jewishness And what does it mean to be Jewish in England today It s a question that I ve always been suspicious of the Booker Prize a solid, stick in the mud reward to literary doggedness and middlebrow worthiness that guarantees reading matter for the leafy home counties if nothing else As a Nobel Prize lite it tends to award writers for what they mean rather than what they write Howard Jacobson s The Finkler Question has a central question that falls perfectly in the Booker court what is Jewishness And what does it mean to be Jewish in England today It s a question that it signally fails to answer.Jacobson s method in posing this question is to tell the story of three men and the women who orbit them my language here merely reflects the novel s sexism rather than my own I m a new man , to quote Roots Manuva The men in question are Julian Treslove, professional double Sam Finkler, m...I don t like the idea that literature is written for or not for any people Sure, you might be able to appreciate War and Peace better if you are a member of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia But you re a fool if you let a smaller share of comparative appreciation get in your way I mean, I can t let the fact that I m middle class and white distract me from the fact that I enjoy listening to Public Enemy I m not comfortable with the idea that anything is beyond my empathy What I m I don t like the idea that literature is written for or not for any people Sure, you might be able to appreciate War and Peace better if you are a member of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia But you re a fool if you let a smaller share of comparative appreciation get in your way I mean, I can t let the fact that I m middle class and white distract me from the fact that I enjoy listening to Public Enemy I m not comfortable with the idea that anything is beyond my empathy What I m saying here, however inelegantly, is that I don t want my background fucking with the ...I kept wanting to quit this unlikeable cramped book, but I didn t, because I kept waiting to see what the Booker Prize committee saw in it I never did I m not sure if this book s unpleasantness says anything valid about British society or British Jewry, but I tend to think the solipsistic paranoia is all the author s None of the characters arethan a sketched idea, lacking realistic grounding For example, despite the all too minutely detailed fear of anti Jewish violence in 21st century I kept wanting to quit this unlikeable cramped book, but I didn t, because I kept waiting to see what the Booker Prize committee saw in it I never did I m not sure if this book s unpleasantness says anything valid about British society or British Jewry, but I tend to think the solipsistic paranoia is all the author s None of the characters arethan a sketched idea, lacking realistic grou...I had no clue what I was signing up for when I began reading this The author began by making a very big deal about the pain of being a Jew in the modern world and ended the book with an impassioned plea to see Jews for what they really are, half right and half wronged, like the rest of us I appreciate that unambiguously Nobody should be singled out for persecution, I agree What I don t appreciate is being bombarded with the words Jew , Ju , Julian with freakish consistency on every page I had no clue what I was signing up for when I began reading this The author began by making a very big deal about the pain of being a Jew in the modern world and ended the book with an impassioned plea to see Jews for what they really are, half right and half wronged, like the rest of us I appreciate that unambiguously Nobody should be singled out for persecution, I agree What I do...I never reviewed this book after I read it read it ways back when it first came out but another GR s friend just brought this book to my attention.I never understood why it won the Man Booker prize Set in London.Jewish frien...Really really really great hard to put down touching and funny unexpectedly challenging presents a difficult topic in a hitting and fearless fashion empowered me with a nuanced perspective and vocabulary with which...Man Booker Prize Winner for 2010.Look at the back of the book Everyone other writers, newspapers etc say how wonderful this book is How he is the funniest writer alive Blah Blah Blah.Maybe I am not the demographic for a Jewish crisis of existence book but it did not make me laugh once, nothing really happended and it was as dull as dish water.Repition of themes, events, sayings, jokes, characteristics cannot be expected to carry a novel over 370 pages And I imagine...This is a great book Don t let the philistines of this pitiful site ruin it for you I picked it up because I hold Wodehouse in such esteem for his comedic novels not that I was expecting Wodehouse here, he just introduced me to this category of writing I had to read somethingcontemporary and since this won the booker prize I just bought it.The first thing I must elucidate is that Finkler and the others seem to beconcerned with melancholic satire and the humour may not be too This is a great book Don t let the philistines of this pitiful site ruin it for you I picked it up because I hold Wodehouse in such esteem for his comedic novels not that I was...I found this book laborious and slow moving The parameters were too constrained to comfortably contain Julian, the main character s obsession with Jews and his wishful wondering if, by any quirk of fate, he could have something in his ancestry that would allow him to lay claim to being partly Jewish This tiresome obsession was sparked by an incident in which he was mugged by someone who, he believed, mistook him for a Jew From then on Julian s thoughts are dominated by ways of being Jewish I found this book laborious and slow moving The parameters were too constrained to comfortably contain Julian, the main character s obsession with Jews and his wishful wondering if, by any quirk of fate, he could have something in his ancestry that would allow him to lay claim to being partly Jewish This tiresome obsession was sparked by an incident in which he was mugged by someone who, he believed, mistook him for a Jew From then on Julian s thoughts are dominated by ways of being Jewish He focuses narrowly on the lives of his friends, Sam Finkler an ASHamed Jew and his old professor, Libor Sevcik a Czech Jewish refugee who fled his country in 1948 He has a clandestine affair with Tyler Finkler, wife of Sam, who converted to Judaism when she married Sam, but he later gets involved with Libor s niece Hephzibah who is the curator of an A...

English
13 February 2018

Howard Jacobson