This book won the Man Booker Prize this fall, and was heralded as the first book to win that was a comedy. I would beg to differ. I found the book profoundly disturbing in it's depiction of racism, both amongst Jews and in society at large. The book is more clever than comic, to my ear. Maybe I just don't get the British humor.
Julian Treslove is the non-Jew, and it is through his eyes and actions that we glimpse the vagarities of anti-Semitism. One of his two Jewish friends is Libor, a retired celebrity reporter, still deeply shaken by the death of his wife. The other new widower is Sam Finkler, an old schoolmate, the first Jewish person Julian ever met, the prototype in his mind of all Jews -- thus "The Finkler Question." Finkler is confident and bold, a successful TV personality and the author of a series of pop philosophy books.
Desperately afraid of stereotyping Jews, Julian nonetheless voices all the classic caricatures, envying their legendary success, their history-dominating bad luck, even the flawless timing of their dismissive shrugs.
Jacobson is like a man playing with a gun who starts pretending to aim for our feet. When is he joking, when is he not? Even while I tried to disentangle what's so disturbing about Julian's special regard for Jews, the book pursues (and belabors) another line of comedy, this one about self-loathing Jews. Finkler, always desperate for attention and a public platform, takes over a group called "ASHamed Jews," an anti-Zionist group that holds endless Talmudic meetings to hammer out the precise dimensions of its members' shame, the crucial distinctions that define "ashamed of being Jewish," being "ashamed as Jews" and being "Jewishly ashamed." And all this is woven through boisterous, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tedious arguments about Israeli exceptionalism.
I found this book exceptionally well written, easy to get through, and as I said above, profoundly disturbing.
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