The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off.

His incompletion, his untogetherness, his beginning waiting for an end, or was it his end waiting for a beginning, his story waiting for a plot.

marvelling at her expertise, at the smell of aloes and frankincense (all the perfumes of Arabia)

‘Just when you think you’ve overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.’

on death -

We talked vulgar. It was our defence against pathos.’

Was it better then – measuring the loss – not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?

was the loss he dreaded precisely the happiness he craved?

He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew – small and dark and beetling. A secret person.

He knew better, he said, which side his bread was buttered.

Jews didn’t have to mention the Holocaust in order to have mentioned the Holocaust. Perhaps they were able by a glance to thought-transfer the Holocaust to one another.

bullies ultimately defeat themselves.’

chiaroscuro.

new word

‘What’s your favourite colour?’ ‘Mozart.’ ‘And your star sign?’ ‘My eyesight?’ ‘Star sign. Star.’ ‘Oh, Jane Russell.’ So had begun Libor’s first date of his widowhood.

I also find Mozart particularly vivid in color -

Libor wondered where the problem lay – in the accent he had not quite lost or the hearing he had not quite kept.

They lost their sense of the ridiculous and she lost them.’

‘What bands did you used to like,’ she corrected herself, then blushed as though she knew the second question was more absurd than the first. Libor turned his ear to her and nodded. ‘I’m not in principle keen on banning anything,’ he said.

she had humoured the aspiring European petit bourgeois in him.

At the end they had talked dirty to each other. It was their defence against pathos.

‘I could use the company but I can’t go through the pain of getting it,’

for me it's the trouble

At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. Explain that.

it's because thg hitch up their pants

It was as though the telephone filtered out everything that wasn’t of the voice alone – the comedy, the bravado, the dancing hands. An old torn tissue-paper larynx was all that was left.

I enclosed a handwritten note.’ ‘You weren’t rude to her.’ ‘Of course not. I just wanted her to see how shaky my handwriting was.’ ‘She may have taken that as proof she excited you.’ ‘She won’t have. I told her I was impotent.’ ‘Did you have to be so personal?’ ‘That was to stop it being personal. I didn’t say she had made me impotent.’

truly enjoying this :)

they were the eyes of a Teuton. It was like looking into the wastes of the frozen North.’

‘One day you will regret needing to be alone, Julian, when you have no choice.’

He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was.

The more beautiful the woman, the more she needs to laugh.

Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more.

Do you ever wake in the morning and ask yourself if you’ve lived the best life you could have lived? Not morally. Or not only morally. Just squeezed the most out of your opportunities.’

‘He’s not now likely to make it as a household name, you mean? No. But there are other yardsticks of success.’

Nosebleeding – like grief, as Treslove recalled Libor saying – is something you do in the privacy of your own home.

For a doctor, Lattimore was, much like his fan, insubstantially put together.

I have patients in their eighties I wouldn’t want to tangle with. I’d say you’re safer out in the world where at least you can run.’

The boy – the man now – played introvertedly, for nobody’s pleasure but his own.

There were advantages in having sons he hadn’t brought up. He didn’t have to blame himself for what had become of them, for one. And he wasn’t the first person they came to when they were in trouble.

Fortnum & Mason, which Treslove liked because it served old-fashioned rarebits and relishes,

No one wins for ever – someone you’ve written a book about must have said that. Isn’t there a famous philosophic wager? Hume, was it?’

‘I suspect you’re thinking of Pascal,’ Finkler said, finally. ‘Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn’t exist, you’ve nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist . . .’

wagering on God ·

The sentence was in your mouth so you transferred it to hers.’

‘It was light.’ ‘You told me it was dark.’ ‘I was setting the scene.’ ‘Misleadingly.’ ‘Poetically. It was dark in the sense of being late, and light in the sense of being lit by street lamps.’

love thirr banter

Even before she opened her mouth Treslove had deduced all that from her demeanour. She looked too amazed by life to be English.

ha!

effervescent

word wise

It’s the idea of her faded beauty I love. Fading as you read.’ ‘You love faded beauty!’ ‘No, God no, not as a rule. I don’t mean in life.’

The resemblance he bore to these men must, in that case, have been of another order. It must have been a matter of spirit and essence. Essentially he was like them. Spiritually he was like them.

He would lift the hem of his life infinitesimally, just enough to make Treslove feel intrigued and excluded, before lowering it again.

‘You believe in the cross?’ ‘No, but I believe in suffering.’

‘Obeying your father doesn’t make you a Jew. Obeying your mother would make you more of one.

‘I think of him as a man who’s always been young. All to do with when one meets a person, I guess.’

this is what a ghost is – the embodiment of what’s upsetting you.

good definition

If life didn’t have a thread of meaning to it, why live it? Some men find God where they least expect to. Some discover their purpose in social action or self-sacrifice.

and a rare few find that life is to be enjoyed -

Your pallor becomes you. I like a woman to look tragic.’