The Finkler Question Read Online Free PDF

understood less now she was on her own. So that was it for Finkler. Enough now with the irrational belief systems. What Treslove couldn't have understood was that the Finkler name still meant something even if the Finkler idea didn't. By staying Finkler, Finkler kept alive the backward sentiment of his faith. By ditching Samuel he forswore the Finkler future.
    On the back of the success of his series of practical wisdom guides he had gone on - his big feet and verbal sprinkling and, in Treslove's view, all-round unprepossessingness of person notwithstanding - to become a well-known television personality, making programmes showing how Schopenhauer could help people with their love lives, Hegel with their holiday arrangements, Wittgenstein with memorising pin numbers. (And Finklers with their physical disadvantages, Treslove thought, turning off the television in irritation.)
    'I know what you all think of me,' Finkler pretended to apologise in company when his success became difficult for those who knew and loved him to accept, 'but I have to earn money fast in preparation for when Tyler leaves and takes me for all I've got.' Hoping she would say she loved him too much to dream of leaving him, but she never did. Which might have been because she did little else but dream of leaving him.
    Whereas Finkler, if Treslove's supposition was correct, was too tall to dream of anything.
    Though their lives had gone in different directions, they had never lost contact with each other or with each other's families - in so far as Treslove could be said to have a family - or with Libor who, first at the height of his fame, and then as it dimmed and his wife's illness became his preoccupation, would suddenly remember their existence and invite them to a party, a house-warming, or even the premiere of a film. The first time Julian Treslove went to Libor's grand apartment in Portland Place and heard Malkie play Schubert's Impromptu Opus 90 No. 3 he wept like a baby.
    Since then, bereavement had ironed out the differences in their ages and careers and rekindled their affection. Bereavement - heartless bereavement - was the reason they were seeing more of one another than they had in thirty years.
    With their women gone, they could become young men again.
    For 'gone', in Treslove's sense, read gone as in packed their bags, or found someone less emotionally demanding, or just not yet crossed his path on the dangerous streets and destroyed his peace of mind.
    4

    After dinner, Julian had walked alone to the gates of Regent's Park and looked inside. Finkler had offered him a lift but he refused it. He didn't want to sink into the leather of Sam's big black Mercedes and feel envy heat up his rump. He hated cars but resented Sam his Mercedes and his driver for nights when he knew he would be drunk - where was the sense in that? Did he want a Mercedes? No. Did he want a driver for nights when he knew he would be drunk? No. What he wanted was a wife and Sam no longer had one of those. So what did Sam have that he hadn't? Nothing.
    Except maybe self-respect.
    And that also needed explaining. How could you make programmes associating Blaise Pascal and French kissing and still have self-respect? Answer - you couldn't.
    And yet he did.
    Maybe it wasn't self-respect at all. Maybe self didn't enter into it, maybe it was actually a freedom from self, or at least from self in the Treslove sense of self - a timid awareness of one's small place in a universe ringed by a barbed-wire fence of rights and limits. What Sam had, like his father the showman parmaceutical chemist before him, was a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek, which Treslove could only presume was part and parcel of the Finkler heritage. If you were a Finkler you just found it in your genes, along with other Finkler attributes it was not polite to talk about.
    They barged in, anyway, these Finklers - Libor, too - where non-Finklers were hesitant to tread. That evening, for