Here is the review of this year's Man Booker prize winner .The title "the Finker question" is a euphemist for "The Jewish question". It is an important book because it helps people to imagine what it is like to be Jewish or broadly speaking, part of a religious minority in multi-cultural Britain.
"The Finkler Question" is indeed a striking novel and a subtle one, a group portrait of three men in later life, each with comic foibles but each, also, feeling the weight of his past, conveyed in the narrative through flashbacks. In their individual lives and in their jostling with one another they present a mix of emotions—embarrassment, defiance, rage, autumnal regret—as they wrestle, sometimes foolishly, with the demons of their own tortured imaginations.
The novel starts with a dinner party in London near the BBC's studios, where Julian Truslove has worked for years. He is joined by Sam Finkler, a minor pundit and a friend from his school days, and by Libor Sevcik, a writer of hugely successful Hollywood biographies. Truslove will be mugged on the way home from the party—all the more humiliatingly when he discovers that the mugger is a woman—and his experience and perspective will be central to the narrative. But thematically a great deal more is going on.
Not incidentally, Finkler and Sevcik are Jews. Truslove (who is not) is fascinated by this fact and by the whole Jewish question, or "the Finkler question," as he calls it. Truslove is in his way a philo-Semite: He even cuckolded his friend Finkler in part because Finkler's wife appeared to him so quintessentially Jewish. (She originally was a gentile.) Finkler himself, though, is at odds with his Jewish identity, so ashamed of Israel that he won't refer to the country by its name, preferring "Palestine." Sevcik, for his part, has a more tragic legacy to contend with: He was born in Central Europe and escaped the Holocaust when many of his relatives did not. Now a widower, like Finkler, Sevcik remembers his wife with painful fondness and fears making a fool of himself on the dating scene.
Confused and often funny musings about what is Jewish—and what to think about even thinking about what is Jewish—animate the book. At the same time, anti-Semitism bubbles all around, trying to impose its own forms of identity on British Jews. It says something about the ultimately comic core of "The Finkler Question" that Truslove, in a kind of bookend to his mugging, finds himself late in the novel set upon by a group of pro-Palestinian Jewish demonstrators outside a Holocaust museum.
With "The Finkler Question" Mr. Jacobson has managed to channel his themes and his characters' emotions in a more palatable form—with nuance, insight and, yes, laughter.He is a very good writer. But definetely not an "English Philip Roth" as many have described him to be. He is more like a "Jewish Jane Austen". But one thing is sure: he is an unusual choice for a Booker at 68 for a first time winner.
No comments:
Post a Comment