The Finkler Question

‘Once I started writing I did think it was good enough. My problem was starting, because everytime I tried to start I didn’t like what I was doing, couldn’t find a way in. It should be like this, it should be difficult.’

Read the full interview here.

‘It won because it was the best book. You expect a book by Howard Jacobson to be very clever and very funny and it is both those things. But it is also, in a very interesting way, a very sad, melancholic book. It is comic, it is laughter, but it is laughter in the dark.’

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

‘Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book. Mr. Jacobson stages a Mad Seder that brings Carroll’s Mad Tea Party to mind […] Treslove so loathes his old friend Finkler that he has turned ‘Finkler’ into his own private synonym for ‘Jew.’ So the real meaning of the book’s title, The Finkler Question, is The Jewish Question, and that’s only where the Finklerisms begin. Obsessively, and with a razor-sharp acuity that justifies the Roth comparisons, Mr. Jacobson has Treslove begin cataloging what he thinks are Finkler traits, Finkler talents, Finkler customs and so on. What unifies all of this in Treslove’s mind is that they’re things he doesn’t have.’

Matthew Syed, The Daily Beast

‘The Finkler Question, a clever, canny, textured, subtle, and humane novel exploring the friendship of three aging male friends, is Jacobson’s 11th novel. Like the others, it is a work of greatness. The central preoccupation is with the nature of modern Jewishness, a common Jacobson theme, but over the course of the book this flays into a powerful and, at times, haunting examination of friendship, love, and loss […] Jacobson’s capacity to explore the minutiae of the human condition while attending to the metaphysics of human existence is without contemporary peer.’

Jacob Weisberg, Slate

‘Weisberg’s Law states that any Jew more religious than you are is mentally insane, while any Jew less religious is a self-hater. The Finkler Question demonstrates this rule’s applicability in Britain, where the striations of Semitism have their own complications and subtleties […] Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny.’

Kirkus Review

‘[Jacobson’s] lead character, a London media type named Julian Treslove, is not Jewish, but he might as well be: He has a Woody Allen–size complex of neuroses and worries, and ‘his life had been one mishap after another.’ Mugged by a woman who utters a mysterious syllable—‘Ju,’ Treslove thinks—while going through his pockets, he finds himself about as angst-ridden as an angst-ridden person can be […] Jacobson’s gentle tale of urban crises of the soul slowly turns into an examination of anti-Semitism, of what it means to be Jewish in a time when ‘the Holocaust had become negotiable.’

Publisher’s Weekly

Jacobson’s wry, devastating novel examines the complexities of identity and belonging, love and grief, through the lens of contemporary Judaism […] Jacobson brilliantly contrasts Treslove’s search for a Jewish identity—through food, spurts of research, sex with Jewish women—with Finkler’s thorny relationship with his Jewish heritage and fellow Jews. Libor, meanwhile, struggles to find his footing after his wife’s death, the intense love he felt for her reminding Treslove of the belonging he so craves. Jacobson’s prose is effortless—witty when it needs to be, heartbreaking where it counts—and the Jewish question becomes a metaphor without ever being overdone.

‘The novel for me is analogous to the story of the blind men and the elephant. In that story, perception of what an elephant was depended on which part of the elephant’s body each man was holding. Factor in to that past history, egos, levels of tolerance for chronicling of incidents of antisemitism…”It’s bad but it’s not exactly Kristallnacht”…, and you get an idea of how difficult, as in the elephant analogy, comprehension of the whole is when perception and the associated conviction that comes with it is only partial and incomplete. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that thoughtful as Jacob’s book is on the question of Jewish identity, it’s also hilariously funny. This is something not unexpected from the man who, upon receiving the Booker, noted that he planned to spend the entirety of the 50,000 pounds to buy his wife a purse because “Have you checked out the prices of handbags these days?” A rich, complex foray into identity construction. Highly recommend.’ 

Lori Duin Kelly, The Booker Prize Book Club