Episode 9 - The Finkler Question
Ep 9- 'The Finkler Question' - Howard Jacobson
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
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.
