The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

dacha

compassion fatigue, is it?’

Compassion comes from another place. You can’t feel compassionate towards yourself or towards your own. It’s

trollop

Prostitutes are working at the time documentaries go out on television.

But other men looking for prostitutes might recognise him, and he knew he could not count on any solidarity of the fallen.

In minutes he would be up on someone’s Facebook as having been seen prowling around Shepherd Market, never mind that the person who h...

hepcat

simulacrum

lubricity

meshuggener.’

abashed

nebbishy.’

schlepper.

After a period of exceptional quiet, anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been – an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will.

There is a kind of eroticism in violence, she told the enthralled assembly. You can gather those you kill to your heart. As you can gather those who kill you. But because the Jews had loved the Germans too much, and gone passively to their deaths, they had resolved against Eros, emptied their hearts of love, and now killed with a coldness that chilled the blood.

discountenanced

Nothing he had seen, nothing that either Finkler or Hephzibah had said, just a feeling. And in jealousy a feeling is a reason.

‘Ah, so you do like the idea of Sam? That’s to say of dinner with Sam?’ ‘Julian, what’s this about?’ ‘I’m wondering if you’re having an affair with him.’ ‘With Sam?’ ‘Or at least thinking about having an affair with him.’ ‘With Sam?’ ‘There you are, you see, you can’t stop saying his name.’ ‘Julian, why would I be having or thinking of having an affair with anybody? I’m having an affair with you.’ ‘That doesn’t stop people.’ ‘Wouldn’t it stop you?’ ‘Me, yes. But I’m not like other people.’ ‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘but then neither am I. You should believe that.’ ‘Then I do.’

goy?’

dissolutes.

You don’t judge fidelity by every act; it’s the desire to say you’re faithful and the desire to be believed.’

escapade?

agitprop

He could smell the harlot allure of her vindictive intelligence, laying out her daughters of Hebron beauty for her father’s enemies to feast and avenge themselves upon.

proscribed

sturgeon

Skittish,

reckoned,

lido.’

There were people who claimed that the paranoid create the thing they fear.

foetor

gestalt

spliff.

Pierrot

preternaturally

precocity

uncanny.’

recalcitrant

raucous

incontrovertibility

refulgence

The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.

He was a scrupulous man. He would not have taken a mistress before he had a wife. Another woman yes, a mistress no. He was a philosopher; nomenclature mattered to him.

To kill our own before the others could.

turpitude

iniquity

ululated

grandiosity?’

statuary eloquence.