Howard Jacobson

A staggeringly brilliant new novel from bestselling and award-winning giant of literature Howard Jacobson.

The Finkler Question

"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..." 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 Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more 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. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

A Novel

Melody Izard

OK it was funny. Some parts were VERY funny. And poignant. There's a suicide and lots of lost love and penises (both circumcised and un). And the premise of a wanna-be Jew is a VERY clever premise. And I'll mention the nice writing. Howard can turn a phrase. But somehow .... it just wasn't enough.

Steven Ovadia

Interesting.

The book seems to satire the Jewish practice of self-obsession and Jacobson implies that Gentiles might have a better handle on Jewish issues than Jews.

It's interesting that a book that parodies Jewish self-hatred winds up with a bit of a self-hating moral. 

Still an interesting read I'd like to re-read down the road.

Steve Parks

Cal Desmond‐Pearson

Neta Steingart

Julian Treslove, a radio producer, and Samuel Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, have been friends since childhood and, as they enter middle age, they reminisce over their struggles with self-identity, anti-Semitism, women, love, and the past.

The Finkler Question

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