British author Jacobson won last year’s Booker Prize for this novel. Reviewers have compared his work to Jane Austen (a novel of manners) and Philip Roth (exploring male-female relations, the dark spaces of the male psyche and the dilemmas of Judaism—all with a biting wit). It is an easy and highly enjoyable read even as Jacobson probes many sides of polarizing issues such as modern day anti-Semitism, Zionism and self-loathing Jews.
Story highlights from audible.com: “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…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 characters’ different approaches to Jewishness against each other…There is a sense that the three male leads are facets of one personality with a schismatic approach to Jewishness.”
Lindley, I'm going to take a "page" out of your book and start listening to the books on my list. Otherwise, I'll never make it through all of them.
ReplyDeleteI always listen in the car and when running--it really adds up over the course of a year!
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