Monday, May 09, 2011

Howard Jacobson interview

The Telegraph.

 Genevieve Fox talks to Howard Jacobson  the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, about last chances in life – and in love.

A Jewish Jane Austen: Howard Jacobson at home in London
When I ring the intercom of Howard Jacobson’s Soho loft, his wife, Jenny De Yong, eventually answers. She sounds nonplussed, as if I were a Jehovah’s Witness she’d rather not admit but was too decent to turn away.
Once inside, the Man Booker Prize-winner is nowhere to be seen. He’s getting dressed, says Jenny. Or rather, re-dressed, into something presentable. He was expecting a phone interview, not a home visit. Or so she says.
After she brings us coffee, Jacobson cuts to the jugular: “Someone said you wrote you wanted to throttle me.”
“It’s true,” I say, blushing. I explain that I tried reading The Finkler Question, the prize-winning novel, for another book group and gave up: too masculine, too many gags, an unsettling rhythm to the prose. “Plus I never really liked the idea of you,” I say. “Too male, too Jewish.”
“That makes sense,” he says, all sensitive and conciliatory. “Mine has not been the most welcome voice in fiction in the past 25 years. I brought it on myself. Too much male swagger. I just need to know what danger I am in.”

Safe enough, I say, wrong-footed by his gentleness. He presses his fingertips together like the university lecturer he once was, scrutinising me with his deceptively dopey eyes. I tell him I eventually enjoyed his 11th novel, got the humour, was moved by its exploration of grief, and fascinated by the Finkler question, shorthand for what it means to be Jewish today.

His mother said it was “too Jewish” to win the prize Jacobson had spent years “smashing”. Three male friends are played off against each other: Treslove the sentimentalist, who fantasises about being Jewish, to get one up on his mate Finkler, the half-baked philosopher, and Libor, the older, wiser widower debilitated by grief.

Full review at The Telegraph. 

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