 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2017) |
 First edition | |
| Author | Howard Jacobson |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | David Mann |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Comic novel |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury |
Publication date | 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | 9781408808870 |
| OCLC | 664673537 |
| 823.914 | |
| LC Class | PR6060.A32 F56 2010b |
The Finkler Question is a 2010 novel written by British author Howard Jacobson. The novel won the Booker Prize.
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they remain good friends, keeping contact with their former teacher Libor Sevcik, a Czech Jew nearing ninety who once tutored in Czech history and worked part-time as a Hollywood gossip columnist.
Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and Treslove's chequered and unsuccessful record with women qualify him as an honorary third widower. They dine together at Libor's grand apartment in central London: it is a sweetly painful evening of reminiscences. At 11:30 pm that night, Treslove is attacked while walking home. It seems he is mugged by a woman who hisses the phrase "You Ju" at him. After much cogitation, Treslove believes what the assailant meant was "You, Jew", sparking a long-running obsession with all things and people Jewish – which he refers to as "Finkler". Treslove gets into a relationship with Hephzibah, the great-grandniece of Libor, and is haunted by his adulterous affair with Tyler, Finkler's deceased wife. In the meantime, Finkler joins an "ASHamed" organization which favours the Palestinians over the Israelis over their land disputes. The novel coalesces into an ending that brings together the disparate narrative strands amongst the three central male characters.
Chairman of the judges and former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion said, "The Finkler Question should not be seen as something that was 'relentlessly middle-brow, or easy-peasy' because it was comic. It is much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things than it immediately lets you know. Several people have used the word wise, and that's a good word." [1]
The novel won the Booker Prize in 2010 [1] and was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. Jacobson was the oldest winner since William Golding who won the prize in 1980, aged 69, for Rites of Passage . In his acceptance speech, Jacobson claimed he was going to spend his £50,000 prize money on a handbag for his wife, asking, "Have you seen the price of handbags?"
It was shortlisted for the JQ Wingate Prize (2011). [2]
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of the novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
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