Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question has won the Booker Prize, beating out far better known shortlisters like C by Tom McCarthy and Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, and Emma Donoghue’s Room, which has been getting quite a lot of buzz of late.
Bloomsbury USA, the book’s stateside publisher, meanwhile, got lucky with the book hitting shelves today.
The publisher’s description calls the book “a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, aging, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.”
An excerpt of the book (scroll down) begins:
He should have seen it coming.
His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.
He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in the daylit world. Lamp posts and trees reared up at him, splintering his shins. Speeding cars lost control and rode on to the footpath leaving him lying in a pile of torn tissue and mangled bones. Sharp objects dropped from scaffolding and pierced his skull.
Jacobson has written a number of novels. Probably the best known are The Making of Henry, Coming From Behind, and Kalooki Nights, which was on the 2006 Booker longlist and which Sara Ivry in these pages called “Hilarious, shocking, provocative.”
Figures. If Thousand Autumns… had been nominated, it would not have won. David Mitchell got too popular too quickly, which turns off the people who make up these lists. You can also strike off Carey and Levy, the two most prominent names here — the winner will come from among the remaining four nominees.
Tom B — Does the absence of Mitchell foretell that the same thing will happen when Franzen’s name pops up next year for his latest? All right by me. I’m only 20 or so pages into Thousand Autumns and am having trouble trying to pronounce the names of the myriad characters and keep up with who’s who. Hoping not to have to apply the Rule of 50.