The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

equivocations

Philatelic

It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.’

putrefaction

He enjoyed being the star of the show, right enough, but he would have preferred the show in which he starred to have been a trifle starrier.

Institute of Nothing in Particular,

raffish

paterfamilias,

She touched his hand. Rock steady hers, as quivery as a jellyfish his.

A Jewess was a woman who made even punctuation funny.

Ergo

‘You’ve slept with me once and you’re sure?’ ‘It’s not about sleeping.’ ‘It will be about sleeping if you meet someone you want to sleep with more.’

cavort

When Hephzibah so much as stirred Treslove’s half of the bed rolled like the Atlantic. He had to hang on to the mattress.

Oxford Street, but whose looks once you peeled her clothes off her were . . . he thought Polish or Ukrainian at first, but the longer he feasted on her nakedness, the more he thought Scandinavian, Baltic maybe.

activist who activated nothing, a no one – a nebbish, a nishtikeit, a nebechel:

sometimes, even for Finkler, only Yiddish would do – a gornisht who belonged to every anti-Zionist group that existed, along with several that did not,

How can you be anything, Finkler wanted to know, by virtue of what you’re not? Am I a Jew by virtue of not being a Blackfoot Indian?

livid

wilted

inane

fringes,

disconcerted

‘A half truth is a whole lie,’

prevarications

putz.

Take a mistress and you have a car crash. Finkler did not of course believe that. Except in the material cause-and-effect sense. Take a mistress and have her give you a blow job while you’re driving down the M40 and your car might well spin out of control. That’s not morality, it’s concentration.

vertiginous

décolletage

whence

It’s one thing to iterate a general political truth, it’s another thing to pick a fight with a person in the street.’

‘How do I know? He wore a black hat. He was there to oppose the motion.’ ‘Did that make him a racist?’ ‘Well, what would you call it?’ ‘I can think of other words.’ ‘I can think of other words, too. But we weren’t playing Scrabble.’

castellations,

rampart

glowered

ghoul

lucidities

brackish,

mangrove

lucubrations.

despondency

besotted

abstruse

We plough the same furrow, he and I.’

inordinately.’

Priapus

fecundity

rashers

fetid.

guttural