The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

The Finkler Question won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction. Many people a lot smarter than I am have analyzed this book in depth, so I’m not going to do that. Any book about self-hating Jews and antisemitism is bound to generate a lot of discussion and I am certain that I have nothing new to add. A quick Google search will yield a zillion articles, both in the popular and the scholarly press, so if you want high level discussion, go there instead of here.

As I’ve said before, I am just interested in the reading experience, and for me, this reading experience was less than satisfying. Here are some good things about this book: The narrator is funny and has a strong original voice. He manages his characters with an ironic detachment, and provides amusing commentary on them, which I enjoyed. Here are some bad things: These unpleasant characters just go on and on and on and they never shut up. Hardly anything ever happens except for a few nasty incidents that get blown out of proportion by the self-absorbed people who experience them. I couldn’t stand those parts.

Apparently this book is a roman a clef, with several characters who are obvious parodies of well-known British academics and pundits. Since I am almost totally unfamiliar with the 21st century British intelligentsia, all those references passed me by completely. If you want, you could try to explore that angle, too, but I can’t be bothered. I’ve had enough of these folks.

(Book 7, 2010)