The Finkler Question

'He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one...' 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 a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czech 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 have 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 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. "The Finkler Question" is a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

ISBN 1408808870   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781408808870 (What's this?)   Pages 320 Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC   Published in London Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing PLC   Height (mm) 234 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 153 Publication date 02 Aug 2010   Academic level General DEWEY 823.914

'A real giant. A great, great writer' Jonathan Safran Foer 'The Finkler Question is wonderful. A blistering portrayal of a funny man who at last confronts the darkness of the world' Beryl Bainbridge Praise for The Act of Love:'It is an almost frighteningly brilliant achievement. Why did the Booker judges not recognise it? Scaredy-cats' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'Naked, haunting, unflinching. Its account of sexual obsession is frightening, painful and finally very moving. A tour de force' Harold Pinter

Copying the urban Jewish American novelists of the 50's and on, but without any talent at all. An uncharismatic man devoid of talent but full of unilluminating mimicry. A man writing with a Birmingham accent that fails even in that to be authentic. - David Cox



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