The Finkler Question

Name: The Finkler Question
ISBN: 9781608196128

A Novel

Howard Jacobson

WINNER OF THE HAROLD U. RIBALOW PRIZE
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Julianan 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.

“It is tempting-after reading something as fine as The Finkler Question—not to bother reviewing it in any meaningful sense but simply to urge you to put down this paper and go and buy as many copies as you can carry... Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding, it is also beautifully written.” —Edward Docx, Observer

“Another masterpiece... The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson's mastery of humour. But above all it is a testament to his ability to describe—perhaps it would be better to say inhabit - the personal and moral worlds of his disparate characters.” —Matthew Syed, Times

“The opening chapters of this novel boast some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language... Jacobson's brilliance thrives on the risk of riding death to a photo-finish, of writing for broke. Exhilaration all the way.” —Tom Adair, Scotsman

“Jacobson's prose is a seamless roll of blissfully melancholic interludes. Almost every page has a quotable, memorable line.” —Christian House, Independent on Sunday

About the Author

Howard Jacobson (born 1942 in Manchester, England) is a British novelist, critic, and broadcaster known for comic fiction that explores Jewish identity and experience in contemporary Britain. Raised in the Manchester suburb of Prestwich, he studied English at Downing College, Cambridge, under the influential critic F. R. Leavis. After graduating, he lectured at the University of Sydney before returning to Britain, where he taught at Cambridge's Selwyn College and later at Wolverhampton Polytechnic — an experience that inspired his debut novel, Coming from Behind (1983).

Jacobson went on to write more than a dozen novels, including The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Zoo Time (2012), both winners of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing — a distinction no other author has achieved twice — as well as Kalooki Nights and Who's Sorry Now?, both longlisted for the Booker Prize. He won the Man Booker Prize outright in 2010 for The Finkler Question, a novel about male friendship, loss, and the meaning of Jewish identity, described by critics for its mastery of humor and its ability to inhabit the personal and moral worlds of its characters.

Often compared to Philip Roth, Jacobson has preferred to describe himself instead as "a Jewish Jane Austen." Alongside his fiction, he built a long career as a columnist and critic, and lives in London.