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The Finkler Question cover art

The Finkler Question

By: Howard Jacobson
Narrated by: Steven Crossley
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Editor reviews

This Booker Prize-winning novel doesn’t cover a lot of thematic ground; like Jane Austen, Howard Jacobson likes to explore a narrow field of study. In his case, it is the UK’s Jewish population especially as focussed around north London. But also like Austen, Jacobson’s miniaturist observations can illuminate and touch on universal questions, and has room for multi-layered comedy.

Julian Treslove is an unspectacular television producer of arts programs and a celebrity impersonator, with two failed marriages behind him and two distant, resentful sons. A gentile convinced that a Jewish identity would offer asylum from his identity crisis, Treslove is acutely envious of his old school friend Sam Finkler, now a highly successful author of glib pop-philosophy best sellers with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen”. For Treslove, Finkler comes to represent Jewish identity: The ‘Jewish question’ (in all its loaded historical ambivalence) becomes the Finkler question, at once sanitized and personalized. Both men regularly meet with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a colorful Mittel-European transplant who serves as the book’s heart (as well as narrator Steven Crossley’s finest achievement). He is crotchety, funny, and touching in his devotion to his dead wife, even while on hilariously awkward dates.

Jacobson has great fun in pitting his character’s different approaches to Jewishness against each other, particularly Treslove’s gauche appropriation (“He looked like Topol; that’s how Treslove knew he was a Jew.”). There is a sense that the three male leads are facets of one personality with a schismatic approach to Jewishness: Crossley, however, is able to give each one their own unique voice. In fact, with The Finkler Question, Crossley gives a masterclass in narration. His characterizations are colorful without lapsing into caricature, and he unfailingly gets the intent behind each line, each rhetorical question, each instance of passive-aggressive indignation (and there’s a lot of that). Especially with this book, the narrator has an important task: the physical attack that kicks off Treslove’s identity crisis hinges on a linguistic confusion, and Crossley’s obsessive delivery of each permutation of the attacker’s garbled words is just one very funny moment in an excellent performance.

Summary

Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2010

Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler 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. Now all three are recently widowed, in their own way, and spend sweetly painful evenings together reminiscing. Until an unexpected violent attack brings everything they thought they knew into question.

©2010 Howard Jacobson (P)2010 WF Howes Ltd

What listeners say about The Finkler Question

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

oh dear....

I bought this book because it's a booker Prize winner and because the audiobook got a really good review in the Telegraph, which I have previously found to be pretty reliable. I wish, however, that I had read some the reviews on the amazon website first.

I'm about 1 1/2 hours into the book. so far there's nothing resembling a plot, the characters are ill-defined and not really very attractive or interesting, and laboured jewish jokes are not really my cup of tea. On top of that, the narration is decidedly off-putting.....What really disappoints me is that Howard Jacobson is supposed to be a humourous author. Well, I dont find him at all funny. Very forced and heavy handed.

So I'm giving up. I may come back to the book if I lose my will to live.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

The Finkler Question

Despite very good reviews I was most disappointed with this book. I only managed to get half-way through before deciding that it is a lot of inconsequential drivel, so I gave up. The main problem is that the story-line is so thin that it does not maintain the listener's to listen on, at least not mine.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Interesting but soulless

Even though I know it was deliberately void of character development, it was just a bit too soulless for me. Lot's of clever thematic metaphors and all that malarkey but all head and no heart makes Serge a dull boy. One for the critics to de-construct.

The narrator didn't help much either. He reminded me of a newsreader half the time. Maybe he was just keeping in spirit with the lack of emotion in the book. The sound quality wasn't great either though.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant, dark, funny and a complete pleasure

This book is such an unexpected treat, especially given most of the other reviews. The 3 main characters (Treslove, Finkler and Libor) are brilliant, very clever and funny but also very human and quite sad and by the end of the book you feel you know them inside out (the reader characterizes them beautifully, especially Libor, my favourite). What does it mean to be Jewish, is it a blessing or a curse? The quest to answer this conundrum, the main theme of the book, makes you often smile inside or laugh out loud but the humour is very dark, constellated with wry wisdom. If you 'get it', this is a most wonderful book. I'm going to read more Jacobson on the basis of this.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

A disappointing answer

I had heard this was a funny book, but I barely smiled apart from one exception where I did laugh out loud. It is overlong, self-absorbed and too full of clever and not so clever wordplay. The minutes or pages devoted to whether a character has heard or misheard a certain phrase, which is returned to again and again, were simply tiresome. Had it been a physical book i may have thrown it out of the window.
ALL the characters seem addicted to the wordplay, which makes one assume it is the author who is addicted to it, and he should realise that it drives some people crazy, and perhaps thereby credit one of his characters with that stance. It would have made the whole more believable. a slow read , I wish I hadnt bothered with. Sorry.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Why on earth did this win a Booker?!

I agree with the previous reviewer. Characters not particularly likeable or sympathetic, plot non-existent, too many and not very interesting or clever jewish jokes. This could have been illuminating and entertaining, but it was neither. I don't even think that it is particularly well-written. A rare disappointment from audible and from the Booker judges.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Dull

Really struggled with this. It goes from mildly amusing at the start through dull and comes to rest in melancholy. Best avoided.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Disappointing

This won the Booker Prize a few years ago. No idea why. Tediously repetitive, two of the three main characters are entirely unsympathetic (Libor was the only person I liked) and not very funny, despite what I thought was a good, well charaterised reading by Stephen Crossley. I almost gave up with two hours to go, and now I have finished I wish I had given up and done something more rewarding with the time.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Enjoyed the second half

I really struggled with the first half of this book mainly because of how the main characters perceived women. It improved with the introduction of a female character or two and getting into the nitty gritty of the diversity of the London Jewish experience.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful!

Some of the language he produces is splendid, not many people can write this well. A backdrop in the story which makes it interesting to be listening to at this particular time (2023/23) is the Hamas/Gaza war in 2008/9.

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