Marta Pontiggia Pontiggia itibaren 1221 Špitalič, Slovenya
I read half of it and then I went back to the fifth book...because SOMEONE promised me they would read it with me....but that person is still stuck on the first chapter!
Entertaining in a mindless sort of way! Amusing and honest in it's portrayal of the main character, who seems like someone you might actually know.
This was such a fun book to read. I was surprised that some of the reviews didn't care for it. But I couldn't put it down! I literally would've stayed home from work to finish this book if I could have. But reading it in less than 24 hrs. isn't bad either! Isabell (aka Belly)her brother Stephen and their mother Laurel go to a beach house every summer to visit Laurel's best friend Susannah and her 2 boys Conrad, (the oldest) and Jeremiah, the younger brother. They have been doing this their whole lives. Belly thinks its cool that she gets to hang with the boys, even though when they were younger they always left her out of their games and what-not. But Jeremiah was a sweetheart and she loves him like a brother while Conrad, she has been in total love with since she was 10 yrs. old. This summer is going to be different because Belly is weeks away from turning 16 and she has changed, which is something the boys do a double-take at when they first see her come to the beachhouse. I loved this story of Belly being friends with these boys and their mother, who treats Belly like one of her own. And Belly always wanting Conrad but for some strange and unknown reason, this summer he is dealing with some inner conflicts and starts drinking and smoking and brooding. I won't spoil the story, but there are reasons for this. My only problem with this book is that Jeremiah is much more suited for Belly and I wish she would love him not like a brother but like a boyfriend. His character is so much more of a man and so much more genuine than that of Conrad, who I don't even particularly like. I'm hoping that maybe in the next installment she will see the light and go for Jeremiah and forget about Conrad! Read this book! It's a great summer read and you won't be able to put it down!
This is perhaps the funniest book I've ever read; it's also seriously brilliant. This is a novel that deserved to win the Booker prize. It's about anti-semitism in particular, but more generally about other-ness and self, about hatred, jealousy and love. The first 2/3 is laugh out loud funny, so much so that I attracted attention from my kids (what's so funny, Mom?), my h (who took the kobo from me to read a passage) and strangers who looked around to see the hilarity for themselves (in the girls' change room, in the lobby of a nursing home). The last third, while funny in spots, is necessarily more serious as the book draws toward its end, and each of the main characters is inescapably confronted with humanity's worse aspects, each of them choosing a different response. The three main characters are an elderly widower, a middle-aged widower, and a middle-aged man who has, his whole life, been a mourner in search of an object to be mourned. The first two are Jewish types. Libor is a nearly 90 year old holocaust and Communist era survivor who moved between Hollywood and London. Sam Finkler is an ASHamed Jew (the name of the organization he co-founded), a loud, successful philosopher-author of self-help books and tv personality. While they have an overabundance of identity to cope with, Julian is their foil, a Gentile with too little, a wannabe something who makes a living by imitation as a celebrity look-alike, a dreamer who wants to hold a dying woman in his arms, and if not that, to be a persecuted Jew. The humour in the novel comes from playing with these types, taking a core of truth and exaggerating it in caricature to highlight its characteristics. And yet the characters aren't simple or flat, but rounded out and turned around so that we can see other dimensions of who they are and how they interact with each other, their children, their wives, their lovers. I don't know if it sounds as funny as it is, or as sharp. I wasn't all that attracted to the book by the descriptions I read of it, but it was available as an e-book at my library, so I downloaded it. Readers on amazon are about evenly divided between people who loved it and people who hated it, which I find interesting and not uncommon. I've been on both sides of that fence. And obviously, in this case, I'm on the side of being wowed. By the end of the first page of The Finkler Question, I knew that Howard Jacobson could write, but it wasn't until the end of the first chapter that I realized just how well. He's a smart guy that Jacobson, and a compassionate one, who isn't afraid to stick his hands into some of humanity's nasty bits. And yet I didn't end the book feeling at all depressed by it. If anything I felt elated by the brilliance of the novel, its humour and its honesty. This is what I drew from it. There are various responses one can have to the pain of this world and to life, but the best of them is to live fully, mourn honestly and love one another.