The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Weisberg's Law states that any Jew more religious than you are is mentally insane, while any Jew less religious is a self-hater. The Finkler Question demonstrates this rule's applicability in Britain, where the striations of Semitism have their own complications and subtleties. It centers on three old friends, one a goy who thinks he might be Jewish, one a Jew ashamed of Israel, and a third who thinks the other two must be nuts. Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, is both a send-up of some very silly people, and an examination of Jewish identity in relation to rising tides of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I don't think you have to be Jewish to find it funny, touching, and troubling.The book was also listed on one of The Guardian's "best of 2010" lists, in which it was said:
It was a great 12 months for the comic novel, with Howard Jacobson's uproarious investigation of grief, friendship and British Jewishness, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a Man Booker winner that surprised and pleased in equal measure. Reviewer Alex Clark found it "a terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water", bringing knockabout humour to bear on the most serious themes.Read our post about that Guardian list for 2010 here.
Slate Contributor, Sara Dickerman's pick:
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I read The Imperfectionists: A Novel in one sleepless gulp. It is a novel, as the subtitle informs you, but a multifaceted one: Each chapter stands as its own finely wrought short story about one of the various employees (and in one case a consumer) of a once-revered international newspaper based in Rome. For a group of professional observers, the journalists have whopping blind spots—the fossilizing stringer has never gotten around to purchasing a computer; the lonely business writer decides to date the very thief who robbed her. Rachman's prose is wildly witty but never arch, and even as his characters tangle themselves into absurd predicaments, you can't help but sympathize with them.Read The Slate's full best-of list here.
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