The Finkler Question
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
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WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
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'Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer' - Observer
'Wonderful ... Jacobson is seriously on form' - Evening Standard
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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 very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.
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'How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? ... The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson's mastery of humour' - The Times
'There are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms' - Daily Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the 2010 Booker Prize, Jacobson s wry, devastating novel examines the complexities of identity and belonging, love and grief, through the lens of contemporary Judaism. Julian Treslove, a former BBC producer who works as a celebrity double, feels out of sync with his longtime friend and sometimes rival Sam Finkler, a popular author of philosophy-themed self-help books and a rabidly anti-Zionist Jewish scholar. The two have reconnected with their elderly professor, Libor Sevcik, following the deaths of Finkler and Libor s wives, leaving Treslove the bachelor Gentile even more out of the loop. But after Treslove is mugged the crime has possible anti-Semitic overtones he becomes obsessed with what it means to be Jewish, or a Finkler. 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.
