The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

‘I’ll find it for you.’ ‘Nice of you, but I doubt you’ll know where to look. I’ll take a raincheck if that’s all right.’

‘We can all paint,’ she said, kneeling in front of him, offering her face. ‘Just let the colours flow.’

Treslove was uncomfortable talking to children, not knowing whether he should address them as very young versions of himself, or very old versions of himself.

Laughter had been his most precious gift to her.

Faith wasn’t a mystery to him; the mystery to him was holding on to faith.

The thought of them lying side by side, silent for all eternity, no laughter, no obscenities, no music, was more than he could bear.

Jewish cemetery is a blank, mute place. As though by the time one reaches here there is nothing further to be said.

For Treslove a woman’s death was a beginning. He was a man made to mourn. He had always imagined himself bent double, like the aged Thomas Hardy, revisiting the torn haunts of love.

were dead men inhabiting a dead faith.

Some arguments you don’t have in order that you will win.

Once you’ve conversed with a lamb you can’t eat it, Libor had explained. Same with any other animal.

he doesn’t even bother to ask himself whether it was really a dream or just a vivid dread. It was both. Or whether the dread was half desire. Aren’t all dreads half desires?

It wasn’t that sport allowed him to deflect his melancholy; sport spoke for his melancholy.

He was seeing too many dawns. Dawns did not suit Treslove.

You never knew what a Jew was or was not going to find funny.

nothing but thinking. He would send his thoughts out at one end of the park and meet them again at the other, borne along by the otherwise unoccupied trees – as telegraph poles transmit the human voice. The same thoughts which he’d brought into the park waiting for him as he left it.

too much time on his hands, that was the problem, too much waiting for whatever it was to happen

He loved the woman. She had synced him up with the universe.

The beauty of the Kaddish, to his sense, is that it’s non-specific. He can simultaneously mourn as many of the dead as he chooses.