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Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I.
The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber.
Watch Howard Jacobson talking about Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It
The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber.
Watch Howard Jacobson talking about Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
31 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
About the author
Howard Jacobson
73 books381 followersHoward Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
February 17, 2013
When semi-successful novelists publish x number of well-reviewed books and have large enough public or media profiles, broadsheets offer them weekly or fortnightly columns which, depending on their popularity, can run for years and years and provide the novelists with an influx of extra income, saving them from the necessary lunge into teaching or humiliating copyediting work for conglomerate ghouls. This seems a more standard practice in Britain than America, where commissioned articles (i.e. essays or belle-lettrism) of greater intellectual substance for one-off fees seems to be the usual sideline for the novelist to the biennial-book-and-royalties norm that barely provides the writer with enough to fund his kids’ shoes. So you can see why the column would be a more tempting prospect for a novelist (who wants to write novels, damn you!), especially if he can treat the column with only 20% of the seriousness he treats his fiction. Howard Jacobson has been writing for The Independent since 1998, which explains why these pieces are all uniformly 3½ pages in length, and flit between comic musings, barroom chatter, opinionated blather and topical prattle, while although debonair and erudite and entertaining, pretty much ends up seeming like fish-and-chip fodder of the classiest calibre: fun but forgettable. The writer’s financial safety is the reader’s loss—same with Will Self. When will he stop titting about with these samey columns and write lengthy essays that befit his towering intellect? Same goes for HJ here.
December 21, 2014
I'm completely charmed. And edified. And enlightened. And admiring. Jacobsen's voice strikes a delightful mix of humor, erudition, insight, and reflection. He only touches on current events enough to ground each essay in topicality. He's not capable of belligerence--he is an Englishman after all. But he's also somehow managed to divest all snootiness, if he ever had any. And his wit is so dry, you'll want a lozenges, lotion, steamers--yet it doesn't chafe.
Don't let the title fool you: these are not curmudgeonly rants. As he addresses straight off in the introduction, the title "suggests a querulousness I don't honestly lay claim to." Instead, at the heart of his aesthetic is the warmest, most generous understanding of humanity and an open-eyed view of creation. Not to say he is drippily opinionless. Not at all. He's quite outspoken on the fatuousness of Ralph Lauren naming a garment The Chatfield Pant, for example. A trip to Australia to see an Aboriginal musical, a visit to an Edinburgh graveyard, going to the opera--each sets off a short riposte on economics, expression in the arts, our legacy as employees, etc. Of the first dozen or so, the most sublime is the report of meeting a pelican on foot in a park. In trying to quote it, I find I cannot remove just one line.
I'm especially in favor of the form; no essay is longer than four pages (owing to their original form, no doubt, as columns in The Independent). Makes for great reading. Try it.
Don't let the title fool you: these are not curmudgeonly rants. As he addresses straight off in the introduction, the title "suggests a querulousness I don't honestly lay claim to." Instead, at the heart of his aesthetic is the warmest, most generous understanding of humanity and an open-eyed view of creation. Not to say he is drippily opinionless. Not at all. He's quite outspoken on the fatuousness of Ralph Lauren naming a garment The Chatfield Pant, for example. A trip to Australia to see an Aboriginal musical, a visit to an Edinburgh graveyard, going to the opera--each sets off a short riposte on economics, expression in the arts, our legacy as employees, etc. Of the first dozen or so, the most sublime is the report of meeting a pelican on foot in a park. In trying to quote it, I find I cannot remove just one line.
I'm especially in favor of the form; no essay is longer than four pages (owing to their original form, no doubt, as columns in The Independent). Makes for great reading. Try it.
February 26, 2015
Whatever it was, I didn't like it. I didn't finish it either.
January 10, 2013
Reminds me of Christopher Hitchens in that 1) he’s an intellectual, and 2) sometimes he drags in references to ideas/events/people I’m blank on…however he doesn’t do that as much as Hitchens, and he’s more readable than Hitchens.
However, he’s at least as thought-provoking and stimulating as Hitchens, and he can write an essay-length statement on something that ends with the splendid (and sometimes shocking) ending of great essays, something I always admire.
However, he’s at least as thought-provoking and stimulating as Hitchens, and he can write an essay-length statement on something that ends with the splendid (and sometimes shocking) ending of great essays, something I always admire.
October 13, 2021
“I hope I’m amicably provocative. Flights of fancy, tales of misadventure, character sketches, eulogies to those I admire and farewells to those I have loved.”
Delicious writing, many laughs.
Suggested by https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot...
Title, Chico line in A Night At The Opera
Notes:
p 2 There’s something about an elephant that brings out the best in people. They look old in body from the moment they were born. Their every step is weary. Elephants break our hearts.
10 Libraries: Don’t mistake me for a puritan. I like the lunacy of libraries. I like the tramps pretending to be immersed in newspapers, and the people who have been swindled of their inheritances trying to put together lawsuits from the only law book on the shelves, and the would-be aristocrats searching family trees, and the general-knowledge freaks memorising every entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the mutterers and the snorers and the wild laughers and the rheumy old men who are here every day, from nine in the morning to six at night, shouting ‘Shush!’ at anyone who coughs. Libraries attract nutters — it’s the flipside of their grand educative function — and it’s proper that whoever haunts books should be kept in mind of the fragility of reason. Books sometimes make you wise, and sometimes send you mad. But the detritus of popular entertainment, which leads neither to wisdom nor to madness, only to terminal triviality, and from which any good library should be a refuge, is something else again.
76 Grief snob. Stories of tormented love touch me, not poverty and third world suffering. Pagliacci mocking his clown cuckold’s reflection.
83 Holiday Reading. Why would you want to read on an uncomfortable deckchair on something as unconducive to concentration as a beach? Leavis took Othello. An example for us all to stay serious.
100 Building a Library: How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.
109 Morris dancing’s mockery, joshing lightness of burly men. Hinting at other sorts of agility. Prole feed an aesthetic offense.
125 Father’s one true sporting passion was wrestling. In every bout, he reckoned, there was a moment when needle entered and the play-acting gave way to genuine anger.
161 I grow full of years, so do I grow to love the years in others. Give me an aged genius before a young one any time.
185 Hardy in Cornwall. It’s a wonderful thing to put your life into a single book, to think about its progress every day, and to be absorbed in its subject matter to the exclusion of all else.
199 The world does still contain people who weigh and judge things differently, for whom the amassing of wealth is a matter of supreme indifference. (UK’s Shark Tank)
202 (on Handel's Messiah) Not the equal of Bach. ... Increasingly, as the censors and maulers and butchers of our culture assume more power, it will be to art — if we can save it — that we turn in order to remember who we once were and what we once believed. … Concordia’s website … the surprising, not to say thrilling, exclamation mark.
206 I know what I want from a funeral. I want desolation. Howl, howl. If it truly doesn't matter whom we burn or bury next — for we are but a mote in Creation's eye — then that is all the more terrible for the dead and all the more desolating for those of us left standing. The end of a life, if we believe a life has meaning, is a dreadful event. The end of a life, if we believe a life has no meaning, is a more dreadful event still. Twist it how you like, death is neither decorous nor rational nor humane.
232 Egotism of the Terrorist … How are they able to convince themself to kill someone? The inviolability of a life that isn’t yours to take. Revenge is a sentimentalization of yourself. My hero is the man who says shit happens, and walks away.
241 I’m on male -sadness watch this week.
248 Alida Valli death … The eroticism of the raincoat. The Third Man portrayed a woman disillusioned and unhappy.
256 Pinter wasn’t put on earth to cosy up to TV presenters. His conversation is with the unseen powers.
288 Vengeance is Mine. When at last enough crimes go unavenged, we become unbelievers.
300 I like it that Leonard Cohen doesn't jig about.
308 2008, Simon Gray death
340 Man Booker notification (Finkler Q) My protestations of scorn were mixed with covetousness.
The assumption is sometimes made that the old are people of diminished feelings, husks of confused recollections and barely remembered desires. … In reality there is no release in old age, we go on with our passions blazingly intact. Terrible and wonderful.
Delicious writing, many laughs.
Suggested by https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot...
Title, Chico line in A Night At The Opera
Notes:
p 2 There’s something about an elephant that brings out the best in people. They look old in body from the moment they were born. Their every step is weary. Elephants break our hearts.
10 Libraries: Don’t mistake me for a puritan. I like the lunacy of libraries. I like the tramps pretending to be immersed in newspapers, and the people who have been swindled of their inheritances trying to put together lawsuits from the only law book on the shelves, and the would-be aristocrats searching family trees, and the general-knowledge freaks memorising every entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the mutterers and the snorers and the wild laughers and the rheumy old men who are here every day, from nine in the morning to six at night, shouting ‘Shush!’ at anyone who coughs. Libraries attract nutters — it’s the flipside of their grand educative function — and it’s proper that whoever haunts books should be kept in mind of the fragility of reason. Books sometimes make you wise, and sometimes send you mad. But the detritus of popular entertainment, which leads neither to wisdom nor to madness, only to terminal triviality, and from which any good library should be a refuge, is something else again.
76 Grief snob. Stories of tormented love touch me, not poverty and third world suffering. Pagliacci mocking his clown cuckold’s reflection.
83 Holiday Reading. Why would you want to read on an uncomfortable deckchair on something as unconducive to concentration as a beach? Leavis took Othello. An example for us all to stay serious.
100 Building a Library: How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.
109 Morris dancing’s mockery, joshing lightness of burly men. Hinting at other sorts of agility. Prole feed an aesthetic offense.
125 Father’s one true sporting passion was wrestling. In every bout, he reckoned, there was a moment when needle entered and the play-acting gave way to genuine anger.
161 I grow full of years, so do I grow to love the years in others. Give me an aged genius before a young one any time.
185 Hardy in Cornwall. It’s a wonderful thing to put your life into a single book, to think about its progress every day, and to be absorbed in its subject matter to the exclusion of all else.
199 The world does still contain people who weigh and judge things differently, for whom the amassing of wealth is a matter of supreme indifference. (UK’s Shark Tank)
202 (on Handel's Messiah) Not the equal of Bach. ... Increasingly, as the censors and maulers and butchers of our culture assume more power, it will be to art — if we can save it — that we turn in order to remember who we once were and what we once believed. … Concordia’s website … the surprising, not to say thrilling, exclamation mark.
206 I know what I want from a funeral. I want desolation. Howl, howl. If it truly doesn't matter whom we burn or bury next — for we are but a mote in Creation's eye — then that is all the more terrible for the dead and all the more desolating for those of us left standing. The end of a life, if we believe a life has meaning, is a dreadful event. The end of a life, if we believe a life has no meaning, is a more dreadful event still. Twist it how you like, death is neither decorous nor rational nor humane.
232 Egotism of the Terrorist … How are they able to convince themself to kill someone? The inviolability of a life that isn’t yours to take. Revenge is a sentimentalization of yourself. My hero is the man who says shit happens, and walks away.
241 I’m on male -sadness watch this week.
248 Alida Valli death … The eroticism of the raincoat. The Third Man portrayed a woman disillusioned and unhappy.
256 Pinter wasn’t put on earth to cosy up to TV presenters. His conversation is with the unseen powers.
288 Vengeance is Mine. When at last enough crimes go unavenged, we become unbelievers.
300 I like it that Leonard Cohen doesn't jig about.
308 2008, Simon Gray death
340 Man Booker notification (Finkler Q) My protestations of scorn were mixed with covetousness.
The assumption is sometimes made that the old are people of diminished feelings, husks of confused recollections and barely remembered desires. … In reality there is no release in old age, we go on with our passions blazingly intact. Terrible and wonderful.
June 20, 2021
Whatever it was, I liked it. Each article usually dissects a contemporary issue; in each case we get both humour and philosophy. Splendid.
December 1, 2021
These essays are so well written - provocative, amusing & opinionated. But the penetrating language is quite superb. What a writer!
August 30, 2018
So so. I've not long finished the Finkler question which was great and clearly he's a top writer. Some of the articles are very funny. I just got a little bit bored of the anti-everything. I know he's trying to be contrary and cynically funny but I got a bit worn out half way through. Not terrible but I found myself flipping through some and only reading those that I was interested in. I'll definitely read Some other novels of his but then again I guess he wouldn't give a damn as I'm not intelligent / high brow enough to appreciate his wit and literary genius!
June 5, 2018
I suppose I am not surprised that in a collection of essays written by an old white man there were several opinions I'd find problematic. I can't tell if it was sufficiently funny to forgive it. It was about a third amusing, a third disappointing, and a third about some obscure British things I have no idea about.
October 29, 2019
Astute, sniping, a gregarious round look at life. A book of essays on topics from Melbourne hairdressers to the death of real reading to tid bits of current affairs. Jacobson has a sense of theatrical style in every construction of a moment that is engrossing. Laughing out loud throughout - boyfriend thought I was watching Seinfeld.
June 1, 2023
Some essays were 4 or 5 stars — and I do love Howard Jacobson and would love to get a pint with him — but overall, I was not too impressed with his prose here. Overly complicated does not always mean clever, Howard.
October 21, 2022
Very entertaining.
January 4, 2023
Not my type of book, but enjoyed the humour.
March 16, 2017
Thanks to an interview he did with Audible, I discovered that Howard Jacobson was a person whom I was interested in reading. As it was the man who interested me, not the plot of one of his novels, I decided to start with his journalism. Having done that and found that I like the way he writes, if not all that he has to say (the views expressed in this book on terrorism and the Human Rights Act are deeply troubling), I will read The Finkler Question in the near future and then, maybe, My Name is Shylock, which was the focus of that Audible interview.
February 23, 2013
Jacobson has an acute observational intellect that is only bested by his literary gift as a writer. To put the two abilities together in one person, well, God mustn't have been paying attention.
Thank God!
After reading this collection of articles from his newspaper column I'm left to wonder if Jacobson could (can) do comedy - I admit to having not read his novels yet - and I may do so now - but if he was twenty years younger I'd have wagered he could (had he'd been inclined and his income depended on it) have out-Seinfelded Seinfeld. He certainly could have been the writer and left the stagecraft to Jerry.
A number of these articles are pure joy; honest reflections on aging, the bafflements of the gender divide, the brashness of youth and so it goes. Some of my favourites aren't necessarily the joyful ones but those where he reflects on acquaintance and friendship in particular on losing his friend Simon Gray and almost-friend Harold Pinter.
A number are equally entertaining and thought provoking as socio-political commentary, or outrage, or derision, or enlightment from a man that has the command of words at his fingers and enough sense, balance and self-esteem to know it.
A highly enjoyable book (Howard - if you're reading this :) and, yes, I came to it - through that utterly detestable, utterly compelling, utterly deserved Man Booker win...(the final article in Howard's book brings context to this closing remark). The Man Booker prize has done me an unexpected favour in leading me to this book without ever engaging Finkler's question.
Thank God!
After reading this collection of articles from his newspaper column I'm left to wonder if Jacobson could (can) do comedy - I admit to having not read his novels yet - and I may do so now - but if he was twenty years younger I'd have wagered he could (had he'd been inclined and his income depended on it) have out-Seinfelded Seinfeld. He certainly could have been the writer and left the stagecraft to Jerry.
A number of these articles are pure joy; honest reflections on aging, the bafflements of the gender divide, the brashness of youth and so it goes. Some of my favourites aren't necessarily the joyful ones but those where he reflects on acquaintance and friendship in particular on losing his friend Simon Gray and almost-friend Harold Pinter.
A number are equally entertaining and thought provoking as socio-political commentary, or outrage, or derision, or enlightment from a man that has the command of words at his fingers and enough sense, balance and self-esteem to know it.
A highly enjoyable book (Howard - if you're reading this :) and, yes, I came to it - through that utterly detestable, utterly compelling, utterly deserved Man Booker win...(the final article in Howard's book brings context to this closing remark). The Man Booker prize has done me an unexpected favour in leading me to this book without ever engaging Finkler's question.
May 27, 2013
Enjoyable - partly because they are bite-size article-length pieces on a wide variety of topics which are frequently humorous, but also I think because Mr Jacobson tackles subjects that others avoid and is prepared to say things which are decidedly un-p.c. at times. It is also good to read a columnist whose self-deprecation appears to be sincere and without the hidden motive of making you want to think more favourably of him. Realism, especially when personally directed, is a rare quality, and one which I admire, but then honesty is my kind of truth.
August 5, 2013
"Whatever it is" is a collection of Jacobson's columns for the Independent newspaper.
This was a joy to read – Jacobson has a beautiful way with words – mellifluous if you like. His topics are wide ranging - from menacing cyclists to porn for the Prince,from popular culture to politics - he almost comes across as a bit of a curmudgeon but this is thoroughly tempered by his beautifully humorous turn of phrase. Very funny
March 3, 2017
Whatever it was, I didn't like it.
There were few good, coherent and insightful pieces, but mostly I felt I was reading random ramblings of the slightly drunken man in the corner of the pub. I know that in life and speech people go off tangent, but it just doesn't work in the written format.
Also, what this book made me realise (maybe I've known it subconsciously though) that being a snob requires a certain level of bigotry.
There were few good, coherent and insightful pieces, but mostly I felt I was reading random ramblings of the slightly drunken man in the corner of the pub. I know that in life and speech people go off tangent, but it just doesn't work in the written format.
Also, what this book made me realise (maybe I've known it subconsciously though) that being a snob requires a certain level of bigotry.
October 25, 2012
I'm sure this guy is sick of Woody Allen comparison's! Apologies Howard, but here's another one :) A great read that rocks along - he's more intellectual than Woody - less whimsical. Expect lots of laughs and be prepared to have your outlook altered. I want to give it 3.5 stars but don't know how.
March 24, 2012
An interesting read, a collection of articles and each one gives you pause to consider. I have not read any Howard Jacobson before and I did enjoy this. I like his insights, humour and ability to not take himself seriously.
September 29, 2013
Mixed bag, like most short article books, some I loved, some were ok and some bored me. He is a clever and articulate writer and I think I may have enjoyed the book more had I read a few at a time (perhaps between other books) rather than trying to read it all at once.
November 12, 2013
I have no idea why but I couldn't listen to more than a few chapter of this book. Perhaps it was the sound of the author's voice that I couldn't get into, I'm really not sure I just didn't enjoy this award winning book.
December 19, 2011
I will begin reading this book most likely this weekend on Christmas Day~
Pastor Dennis
Pastor Dennis
June 21, 2012
Entertaining, thought-provoking, funny and wonderful writing.
June 3, 2013
Brilliant!
January 16, 2014
I love Howard Jacobsen's turn of phrase and I will not forget his description of the men's clothing store for the mafia for a long time
April 23, 2014
Enjoyed the intelligent and witty writing though being from India, I did not quite understand the contexts from which he had written few articles.
July 15, 2014
Jacobson is acerbic, funny, annoying, and insightful. He can be scary but always articulate. I found him real. Some parts of this book really added to my thinking, which I appreciate very much.
December 6, 2012
The man is a hero of mine, plain and simple.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews