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April 1, 2011
Booker Prize winner to visit
Howard Jacobson will speak at UBC’s Frederic Wood Theatre.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Recent Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson will be in Vancouver this month, as the guest of the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival and the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. He will be interviewed by Hal Wake at the Frederic Wood Theatre and, in anticipation of that appearance, Jacobson spoke with the Jewish Independent.
Jacobson is a multiple-award-winning London author, broadcaster and columnist (for the U.K. Independent). The Man Booker Prize – for which he has been longlisted twice (for Kalooki Nights in 2006 and for Who’s Sorry Now in 2002) – is special though.
“Yes, winning has made a huge difference, not only to sales (The Finkler Question has so far sold 500,000 copies of the English edition alone), to translations (to date, it is being translated into 23 languages), to the reputation of my back list (those of my novels that were not previously published in America, for example, are now being published by Bloomsbury US, and all are being repackaged and republished in the U.K.), but above all to my sense of myself,” said Jacobson about the impact of the prize on his life. “I have been receiving excellent reviews for many years now, but I was talked about as an acquired taste, an underrated novelist, a writer never quite given his due when the awards are given out, etc. Well, all that’s over now.
“So there are mixed sensations of relief – at least I don’t have to fret about the Man Booker anymore – and, of course, vindication,” he continued. “Every serious writer feels he has something to prove, so long as his books aren’t prominently displayed in bookshops, so long as his readership is small, and so long as he is not well known outside his own country. Now I have to worry about something quite different, and that’s finding the time away from public readings and book tours, to go on writing. I much prefer it this way.”
Back in 2007, when the JI spoke with Jacobson about his then-upcoming appearance at the 23rd annual JCCGV Book Festival, he stressed that, while there’s a lot of what he knows about life in his books – at that time, he was promoting Kalooki Nights – his novels aren’t autobiographies. (“Confident in his Jewishness,” jewishindependent.ca archives, Nov. 9, 2007) When he spoke at Maidenhead Synagogue in England last November, he mentioned, about The Finkler Question, “The autobiography of me in this book is the gentile.” (“Novel isn’t too Jewish after all,” jewishindependent.ca archives, Nov. 26, 2010) When the JI asked him, what he meant by that comment and whether his writing was becoming more personal, Jacobson responded, “No, I have always denied that I’m an autobiographical novelist – only The Mighty Walzer was autobiographical – but, of course, every novel is in part the story of the state of your imagination at the time you are writing it.
“My point about Julian Treslove, the gentile who would like to be Jewish in The Finkler Question, is that I didn’t have to think far outside myself to understand him. I, too, have often felt a stranger to the Jewish experience – my nose pressed against the window, looking in. Though I was brought up highly conscious of my Jewishness, I never really understood what being Jewish meant, often felt as much outside the Jewish world as I felt outside the gentile world. I have learnt about being Jewish – I am not talking about Jewish ritual and observance now, I am talking about Jewish thought, Jewish wit, Jewish self-consciousness – as I have gone along. And I suppose I am still doing that. So, when people ask me how I have managed to imagine myself into a gentile trying to make sense of Jews, I tell them that was the easy part.”
The Man Booker Prize press release announcing Jacobson’s win described The Finkler Question as “a novel about love, loss and male friendship, [which] explores what it means to be Jewish today.
“Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language,’ The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful’ and ‘richly satisfying’ and as a novel ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding.’”
Jacobson would no doubt prefer the phrasing of this description to the more simplistic “Jewish” and/or “comic,” which have been used to categorize his writing over the years.
“One never likes any label,” he explained. “‘Comic’ suggests light and unserious, and I am not that. The Finkler Question is not a comic novel; it’s a tragic novel that often makes you laugh. The best laughter isn’t a relief from seriousness but the opposite. It deepens. And when you laugh in my novels, you aren’t always certain that you aren’t weeping. Laughter on the cliff-edge is what I go for.
“As for ‘Jewish,’ well, what does that mean? I write often about Jews. But my novels are very much in the English tradition. I hear Dr. [Samuel] Johnson and Jane Austen and [Charles] Dickens when I write – unlike the North American Jewish novelists, who are more likely to hear Isaac Babel and [Franz] Kafka. However, I am more than Jewish in the sense that I write about Jews: I try to bring to the English novel a greater tumultuousness of feeling and expression than it is accustomed to containing, a different idea of wit, a more risky mixing of hyperbole and sorrow, a vociferousness and anger, a joking that seizes you by the throat and probably isn’t joking at all – and these I see as Jewish qualities.”
As for what the audience in Vancouver can expect when Jacobson visits, he said he isn’t planning on speaking about anything in specific. “I like fielding whatever comes,” he said. “The tougher and more unexpected, the better.”
Jacobson’s conversation with Wake takes place on Wednesday, April 13, 7:30 p.m. The Frederic Wood Theatre is located on the campus of the University of British Columbia, at 6361 University Blvd. Tickets are $21/$19 (plus service charges) and are available from Vancouver Tix online at vancouvertix.com or by phone at 604-629-8849.
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