The Finkler Question

The Fincler Question by Howard Jacobson Julian Treslove a
professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker
and Sam Finkler a popular Jewish philosopher writer and
television personality are old school friends. Despite a
prickly relationship and very different lives theyve never
quite lost touch with each other – or with their former
teacher Libor Sevcik a Czechoslovakian always more
concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now
both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed and with
Treslove his chequered and unsuccessful record with women
rendering him an honorary third widower they dine at
Libors grand central London apartment. Its a sweetly
painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove
themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a
time before they had fathered children before the
devastation of separations before they had prized anything
greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better perhaps to
go through life without knowing happiness at all because
that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has
tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his
friends losses. And its that very evening at exactly
11:30pm as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window
of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks
home that he is attacked. After this his whole sense of
who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.