Luckily we had a big enough forum to discuss the work of Jacobson. It was a most enjoyable evening (thank you Sally) despite the fact that most members of the group struggled to finish the book! Our impression was that this is very much a "blokes'" book and we found the characters and their voices hard to relate to.
We thought that the author was clever using "Finkler" to be synonymous with "Jew" in this novel. He was then able to freely play around with this word and all it's connotations and variations. We generally felt that we needed more of an insight into Jewish customs and vocabulary to fully appreciate the author's cleverness and humour.
We give this book a rating of 5/10.
Our next book is A Short History of Tractors in the Ukraine by Marina Lewycka and our meeting is now postponed to August 31st at Jane's.
Yes 5/10. 5/5 for great writing! 0/5 for having to put up with the Julian Treslove character for 300 pages. I agree with Robyn, he would be very entertaining on screen or stage, but very hard work to tolerate for 300 relentless pages. Then I finished the book thinking -what happened? The point of it all was elusive to me– or was that the point? After that am actually looking forward to learning all about tractor parts in the next book...
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