Reader's Review

In addition to my book group's selection, I read two other books during September. 

Howard Jacobson dedicated The Finkler Question to "the memory of three great friends" who all died in 2009, and I think this book was the author's attempt to come to terms with their deaths.  Two of the book's three main characters are struggling to adapt to life without their wives.  The primary character is as hapless and pitiful a speciman of modern manhood as one might find in Philip Roth or John Updike.  I kept putting this book down because I had a hard time relating to the characters, but then again I kept picking it up and continuing. 

I loved this passage--where Libor, the almost 90-year-old widower, goes to meet a woman he hasn't seen in fifty years--for its honesty:

"He hadn't gone to meet her with the intention of courting her again, he absolutely had not.  But had he, had he, he would have been disappointed...For her age a woman couldn't have looked better.  But for her age...Libor wasn't looking for a woman to replace Malkie, but had he been looking for a woman to replace Malkie the brutal truth was that this woman was, well, too old."

"Libor was not blind to the cruel absurdity of such thoughts.  He was an elfin man with no hair, his trousers didn't always reach his shoes...he was liver-spotted from head to foot--who the hell was he to find any woman too old?  What is more, where he had shrunk, she must have grown taller, because he had no memory of ever lying with a woman this size.  A thought which he could see, as she surveyed him, mirrored hers exactly.  No doubt about it:  if she was out of the question for him, he was still more out of the question for her."

"And all of this Libor had decided in the moment of their shaking hands."

Half a Life is the first book I have read by V. S. Naipaul, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.  The main character, Willie, is born and grows up in India, attends university in London, and then moves to a Portuguese colony in East Africa.  The back cover's synopsis describes the story much better than I can: 

" Spanning three continents and entire history of caste, class, exile, and dislocation, Half a Life is a beautifully resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity."

I definitely want to read other books by this author!