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Description: ‘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
Julian Treslove, the human nucleus of Howard Jacobson's Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question, is this lady's opposite. He too wants to be Jewish – but he is less attracted by the prospect of joyful holidays and ethical rigour than he is by Jewish pain and terror. Mugged one night on a London street, he swears he hears his attacker uttering anti-Semitic epithets. Did he? Maybe, maybe not. But only someone marinated for so many years in the absence of oppression could desire victimhood this badly
Keywords::::
finkler question,the finkler question,man booker prize,man booker prize 2010,the finkler question by howard jacobson,the booker prize
Description: ‘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
Julian Treslove, the human nucleus of Howard Jacobson's Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question, is this lady's opposite. He too wants to be Jewish – but he is less attracted by the prospect of joyful holidays and ethical rigour than he is by Jewish pain and terror. Mugged one night on a London street, he swears he hears his attacker uttering anti-Semitic epithets. Did he? Maybe, maybe not. But only someone marinated for so many years in the absence of oppression could desire victimhood this badly
Keywords::::
finkler question,the finkler question,man booker prize,man booker prize 2010,the finkler question by howard jacobson,the booker prize
