Book Club – The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

The Chestermere Public Library’s Novel Book Club met on Thursday, June 20 to discuss The Finkler Question, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.
This did not turn out to be an easy reading book for the club’s last meeting before the summer hiatus! The main character, Julian Treslove, is a middle aged man with no direction to his life. He doesn’t live in the moment, he’s always looking ahead, worried (or perhaps hopeful) that something tragic will happen to him. But nothing does. His life has become aimless. Treslove’s two closest friends both happen to be Jewish and widowed; Sam Finkler, a television personality and author, and Libor Sevcik, who was formerly their history teacher and once worked a Hollywood gossip columnist. Trelove holds up Finkler as his prototype of Jews and privately calls all Jews “Finklers.” In that sense, the book’s title is actually “The Jewish Question.” Then, something dramatic finally happens to Treslove: he is mugged and relieved of his wallet. To his shame, he realizes he was mugged by a woman, and he allowed it by not resisting. And she said something to him. Was it “Your jewels?” or “You’re Jules?” No, more like “You Jew.” Trelove obsesses over the idea that he was mistaken for Jewish. He then desires to become Jewish, and tries to enmesh himself in their culture through his two friends.