According to the reviews on the back cover, The Finkler Question is hilarious. The front cover proclaims that it won the 2010 Man Booker Prize. A reviewer from the London Times asks "How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterization and the penetration of this insight?"

I dunno how exactly, but I did not lose myself in admiration of Jacobson while reading The Finkler Question.

Two friends of Julian Treslove have both lost their wives. Julian daydreams about losing his, but first he would need to get one. (Most of his girlfriends leave him because he's "morbid." That's perfectly understandable if he's waiting around for them to die tragically in his arms, which he is, in his fantasies.) His two friends are Jews, and quite a bit of what I read deals with Julian's percieved differences between himself and his friends. Which I found to be neither interesting nor witty. I just didn't get it.

I made it a third of the way through the book and finally accepted that I am unable to sympathize at all with the incredibly neurotic Treslove and I am not sufficiently intrigued by what happened in the first 112 pages to finish the book and find out what happens.