Howard Jacobson is described as “Our funniest living writer…” by the Daily Telegraph on the back cover of his latest, Booker prize short-listed novel, The Finkler Question
The question really is: where is the humour?
Another testimonial about Jacobson on the back cover says the book is “a blistering portrayal of a funny man who at last confronts the darkness of the world.” And now it begins to make some sense. The Finkler Question, it appears, is a not-so-funny novel by a normally humorous writer. The next question that arises after reading the book is: should he have stuck to humour?
The Finkler Question is about three men, Julian Treslove a former BBC worker, his school friend Sam Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality and their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech more concerned with the wider world that with exam results.
Libor and Finkler have both been recently widowed and Treslove finds it impossible to stay in a relationship, having had countless disastrous encounters. Yet, he is a man who finds himself obliged to fall in love with every single woman he meets, including Finkler’s wife. He is a huge failure of a man with no identity of his own, who always seems to be waiting for something to happen.
Finkler is a cynical man who has seen it all, with a “been there, done that” attitude to everything. What he finds as the only way of defining (and entertaining) his bored self is to play internet poker and become a Jew-deprecator or part of an ASHamed Jew society, though he is Jewish himself. He thinks it is becoming to deride his own kind, making him a modern, more acceptable kind of Jew — one who knows his faults.
Libor is an “incorrigible wifelover”, who in the aftermath of losing his beloved wife, Malkie, begins to become a bit unhinged. He also finds solace in disliking his own kind and not feeling any remorse whatsoever. He, in fact, feels inferior to German Jews, being a Czech Jew himself. Thus we are introduced to the notion of racism within Jews. All Jews in the book however, who are living in London, seem to be ashamed of Israel, a place they would rather not be associated with.
Through a series of unspectacular and oft repeated events, including an inconclusive racist attack on Treslove for being a Jew, when actually he is not, the book meanders along. The book is about being Jewish and surviving it in today’s context. The book brings out the fear and misgiving associated with it, even today, so many years after the Holocaust. For Libor, the old Czech Jew muses, “Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Stalinism. Those things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go to. They were indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.”
In parts, the book reads like an encyclopedia on circumcision — even suggesting it useful in keeping husbands altogether more faithful, and in others it expounds on various obscure Jewish practices. Eye-opening all the same, the relevance of it all to the story seemed questionable.
In an Indian context, the book’s central theme would seem even less relevant, removed as we are to an extent from the horrors of the Holocaust. But the question is what keeps the horrors alive and why? Would it not be preferable to forget and let everyone else forget, too?

Mohyna Srinivasan is the author of The House on Mall Road