Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Hogarth (2014), Edition: First Edition, 352 pages
Description
"A profound, darkly comedic parable set in a future where collective memory has vanished following a historic catastrophe, and one young couple's love affair could have shattering consequences for the human race. In a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited, J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. After the devastation of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, all that should remain is peace and prosperity. Everyone knows his or her place; all actions are out in the open. But Esme Nussbaum has seen the distorted realities, the fissures that have only widened in the twenty-plus years since she was forced to resign from her position at the monitor of the Public Mood. Now, Esme finds something strange and special developing in a romance between Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen. As this unusual pair's actions draw them into ever-increasing danger, Esme realizes she must do everything in her power to keep them together--whatever the cost. With a sense of the dramatic sweep of Michael Ondaatje and the dystopian, literary sensibility of Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson's J is an astonishing feat of fiction. In this exquisitely written, beautifully playful and imaginative, and terribly heart-breaking work, Jacobson gathers his prodigious gifts for the crowning achievement of a remarkable career"--… (more)
Awards
Booker Prize (Longlist — 2014)
Wingate Literary Prize (Shortlist — Fiction — 2016)
Goldsmiths Prize (Shortlist — 2014)
Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Fiction — 2014)
Language
User reviews
LibraryThing member kidzdoc
This dystopic novel and love story is set in the country of Ofnow in the mid to late 21st century, after a catastrophic event known as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED or the PISSASTROPHE led to the near complete annihilation of an unnamed ethnic group. The national and local government, in an effort
Kevern 'Coco' Cohen, a woodcutter and teacher at the local college, is introduced to a younger woman, Ailinn Solomons, and they begin a troubled relationship with each other. Kevern is secretive, paranoiac, and obsessed with keeping himself and Ailinn safe from the prying eyes and attention of the townspeople; she, still in her teens, is both naïve about what happened in the past and the menace that currently takes place. Kevern is suspected of committing a heinous crime, and falls under the attention of the local police, and simultaneously the two lovers are also being watched closely, as their relationship holds promise for the redemption of the troubled society.
Jhas an interesting premise, but I found it to be a tiresome and boring read, as the protagonists were uninteresting and inscrutable, particularly Kevern, and the novel was both repetitive (Jacobson must have mentioned Ailinn's "ugly feet" at least two dozen times!) and unfocused, with too much attention paid to marginally relevant characters. This is a clever and arguably well written novel, but one that is ultimately disappointing and forgettable.
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to heal past wounds, has forbidden its citizens to discuss the tragedy in detail, and books, television, computers and even furniture from that time or beforehand are no longer available or permitted in homes. The people of Ofnow are exceedingly polite and apologetic to each other, but underneath this apparent tranquility lies deep hatred, and numerous acts of mild to extreme violence are hidden from the public. The citizens closely watch those within and outside of their homes, to ensure that everyone is complying with the government's mandates.Kevern 'Coco' Cohen, a woodcutter and teacher at the local college, is introduced to a younger woman, Ailinn Solomons, and they begin a troubled relationship with each other. Kevern is secretive, paranoiac, and obsessed with keeping himself and Ailinn safe from the prying eyes and attention of the townspeople; she, still in her teens, is both naïve about what happened in the past and the menace that currently takes place. Kevern is suspected of committing a heinous crime, and falls under the attention of the local police, and simultaneously the two lovers are also being watched closely, as their relationship holds promise for the redemption of the troubled society.
Jhas an interesting premise, but I found it to be a tiresome and boring read, as the protagonists were uninteresting and inscrutable, particularly Kevern, and the novel was both repetitive (Jacobson must have mentioned Ailinn's "ugly feet" at least two dozen times!) and unfocused, with too much attention paid to marginally relevant characters. This is a clever and arguably well written novel, but one that is ultimately disappointing and forgettable.
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LibraryThing member danieljayfriedman
With J, Howard Jacobson provides a unique, seriocomic contribution to the Man Booker Prize canon of dystopian novels.
Jacobson portrays an England in the near future, perhaps three or four generations from the events referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, or, alternatively, the Twitternacht,
At a superficial level, J can be read as a novel about the results of a latter-day Holocaust, perhaps writ smaller. But at a more basic level, J centers on the apocalyptic consequences of how modern societies deal with the Other. Depending upon the society, the Other might be Jews, or Dalits, or Romany, or Kurds, or Rohingya, or, for that matter, Palestinians or gays. In J, the formidable Esme Nussbaum makes this clear when she speaks of the need to restore true harmony to English society through finding “some other ethnic or religious group that could stand in as hate object for that which had been obliterated.” But not any group will do: “You have to see a version of yourself—where you’ve come from or where you might, if you aren’t careful, end up—before you can do the cheek-to-cheek of hate.”
Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Kazuro Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Howard Jacobson’s J isn’t a weather forecast or a prediction of election results. Rather, J is a warning about elements of one possible and very alarming future.
Jacobson portrays an England in the near future, perhaps three or four generations from the events referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, or, alternatively, the Twitternacht,
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or the Great Pissastrophe. In the Ofnow England of Howard Jacobson’s J, good manners prevent inquiring about WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. Jacobson never details WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, leaving the reader to imagine a spontaneous outpouring of destruction aimed at Jews. In the England Ofnow, a gently enforced harmony reigns. Jazz is subversive. Books aren’t banned, just out of print. Bookstores and libraries aren’t permanently shuttered, some just indefinitely closed for renovation. University professors no longer teach art; instead, they teach Benign Visual Arts. And, to encourage social harmony, all surnames names have been changed to Cohen, Nussbaum, Gutkind, Morgenstern, Kroplik, and so forth. City and town names reflect the new social harmony as well: Port Reuben. Black clothing is available only illicitly. At a superficial level, J can be read as a novel about the results of a latter-day Holocaust, perhaps writ smaller. But at a more basic level, J centers on the apocalyptic consequences of how modern societies deal with the Other. Depending upon the society, the Other might be Jews, or Dalits, or Romany, or Kurds, or Rohingya, or, for that matter, Palestinians or gays. In J, the formidable Esme Nussbaum makes this clear when she speaks of the need to restore true harmony to English society through finding “some other ethnic or religious group that could stand in as hate object for that which had been obliterated.” But not any group will do: “You have to see a version of yourself—where you’ve come from or where you might, if you aren’t careful, end up—before you can do the cheek-to-cheek of hate.”
Like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Kazuro Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Howard Jacobson’s J isn’t a weather forecast or a prediction of election results. Rather, J is a warning about elements of one possible and very alarming future.
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LibraryThing member rmckeown
One of these years, I am going to assemble all the novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and read them along with the jury, and then try and guess which will win. For years I have been waiting until the final announcement before buying any of the nominees. But lately, I have been reading some
Set on an island surrounded by seas that “lap no other shore,” the mysterious villagers, suspicious of strangers and each other, constantly apologize for even the slightest of offenses. The government suppresses all history, heirlooms, photos, and anything which might remind the people of “What Happened, If It Happened.” Many residents have secret stashes of letters, diaries, and old books, which they use to try and piece together the past. Chilling reminders of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with tinges of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Kevern Cohen meets the stunningly beautiful Ailinn Solomons who arrives one day on the shore. Kevern experiences love at first sight, and Ailinn is attracted to Kerern after some prodding by Esme Nussbaum, her guardian. Many of the characters have cryptic phone calls about the couple, including a shady police inspector, a gnarly barber, and Esme.
Jacobson writes, “Esme Nussbaum looked around her while Rabinowitz spoke. Behind his head a flamingo pink LED scroll repeated the advice Ofnow had been dispensing to the country for the last quarter of a century or more. ‘Smile at your neighbor, cherish your spouse, listen to the ballads, go to musicals, use your telephone, converse, explain, listen, agree, apologize. Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love’” (17-18).
This sounds innocuous, but apparently, music has been censored, the telephones are all tapped, and everyone reports -- to some unknown person -- what they have heard and seen.
The title of the book is actually a capital “J” with two horizontal lines across the middle. The custom has been to put two figure across your mouth each time a word is spoken which begins with a “J.” Almost every J has two lines on the printed page, except for one word: “just,” and as the novel progressed, I began to notice words without the two lines. Curiousier and most curious. This novel cries out for a second read. While I have a pretty solid theory about “What Happened, If It Happened,” not all the clues lead to the same conclusion.
Kevern’s father left him several boxes labeled for opening at important stages of his life. He fears opening the one marked open when you are about to become a father. These boxes disturb Kevern, because, as Jacobson writes, “Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganized, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind” (51). Kevern suffers from OCD, and he worries about everything.
Howard Jacobson’s J will provide lots of absorbing reading. Part mystery, part love story, and all dystopian, it warns me about what I might be missing in those second novels which lose out every year. Certainly many of them must deserve 5 stars.
--Chiron, 4/24/15
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novels written by previous winners, and I have enjoyed them every bit as the winners. My wife gave me a copy of J by Howard Jacobson, who won the Booker in 2010 for The Finkler Question. Jacobson’s 2014 novel, J, shows me exactly what I am missing among the also-rans.Set on an island surrounded by seas that “lap no other shore,” the mysterious villagers, suspicious of strangers and each other, constantly apologize for even the slightest of offenses. The government suppresses all history, heirlooms, photos, and anything which might remind the people of “What Happened, If It Happened.” Many residents have secret stashes of letters, diaries, and old books, which they use to try and piece together the past. Chilling reminders of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with tinges of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Kevern Cohen meets the stunningly beautiful Ailinn Solomons who arrives one day on the shore. Kevern experiences love at first sight, and Ailinn is attracted to Kerern after some prodding by Esme Nussbaum, her guardian. Many of the characters have cryptic phone calls about the couple, including a shady police inspector, a gnarly barber, and Esme.
Jacobson writes, “Esme Nussbaum looked around her while Rabinowitz spoke. Behind his head a flamingo pink LED scroll repeated the advice Ofnow had been dispensing to the country for the last quarter of a century or more. ‘Smile at your neighbor, cherish your spouse, listen to the ballads, go to musicals, use your telephone, converse, explain, listen, agree, apologize. Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love’” (17-18).
This sounds innocuous, but apparently, music has been censored, the telephones are all tapped, and everyone reports -- to some unknown person -- what they have heard and seen.
The title of the book is actually a capital “J” with two horizontal lines across the middle. The custom has been to put two figure across your mouth each time a word is spoken which begins with a “J.” Almost every J has two lines on the printed page, except for one word: “just,” and as the novel progressed, I began to notice words without the two lines. Curiousier and most curious. This novel cries out for a second read. While I have a pretty solid theory about “What Happened, If It Happened,” not all the clues lead to the same conclusion.
Kevern’s father left him several boxes labeled for opening at important stages of his life. He fears opening the one marked open when you are about to become a father. These boxes disturb Kevern, because, as Jacobson writes, “Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganized, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind” (51). Kevern suffers from OCD, and he worries about everything.
Howard Jacobson’s J will provide lots of absorbing reading. Part mystery, part love story, and all dystopian, it warns me about what I might be missing in those second novels which lose out every year. Certainly many of them must deserve 5 stars.
--Chiron, 4/24/15
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LibraryThing member eastmad
What if, it happened. Not that it did.
The central conceit behind this book, and what it says are quite brilliant. Unfortunately, the execution is by a man fascinated by his idea, not by the effort needed to realize it.
The world that Jacobson creates, is sketched out slowly. Something has happened,
Because Jacobson probably sees himself as a certain type of novelist, rich development of the world is not his thing. In this way, quite a bit of depth is lost. We get a handful of interesting characters, but not enough to tell us about Howard's Way.
This is a nearly book. Or an almost book. Maybe some chapters went missing. Maybe it got big, or the time got away. What if.
I suspect this book would have been more powerful with a different writer, or perhaps a more serious editor.
The central conceit behind this book, and what it says are quite brilliant. Unfortunately, the execution is by a man fascinated by his idea, not by the effort needed to realize it.
The world that Jacobson creates, is sketched out slowly. Something has happened,
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probably incurring violence, probably to a race whose name begins with J. Some of the reveal is very artful, but some of the life in the book dissipates towards a theory of unrest and regeneration that are not explored by the characters. Faced with writing speculative fiction, I think the author baulked.Because Jacobson probably sees himself as a certain type of novelist, rich development of the world is not his thing. In this way, quite a bit of depth is lost. We get a handful of interesting characters, but not enough to tell us about Howard's Way.
This is a nearly book. Or an almost book. Maybe some chapters went missing. Maybe it got big, or the time got away. What if.
I suspect this book would have been more powerful with a different writer, or perhaps a more serious editor.
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LibraryThing member BrandieC
I finished reading J, by Howard Jacobson, on March 15, and it has taken me more than a month to find the words for this review. At the 13% mark on my Kindle, I was ready to cast the book aside (and I almost never let a book defeat me), but because I had committed to read and review it, I picked it
The Goodreads description of J compares it to the dystopian classics 1984 and Brave New World, but I think this analogy ignores J's nuanced approach. When I think of "dystopian" fiction, whether it be 1984 or The Hunger Games, I think of imaginary societies which are obviously "undesirable or frightening" (to use Wikipedia's definition) from the moment the reader is introduced to them. In contrast, the society in J, created in response to an event referred to "WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED", initially appears to be a successful utopia in which all citizens are truly equal, having even given up their names to prevent identification with a particular racial, religious, or ethnic group.
"It granted a universal amnesty, dispensing one and for all with invidious distinctions between the doers and the done-to. Time must close over the events, and there is no better way to ensure that than to bring everyone together retroactively. Now that we are one family, and cannot remember when we were anything else, there can be no question of a repetition of whatever happened, if it did, because there is no one left to do to again whatever was or wasn't done."
The reader learns only gradually about the flaws in this plan, as the society discovers what happens when there is an "us" but no "them": "Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all."
This idea has disturbing implications not only for the society in J, but for our own, particularly in the context of race relations. Shortly after I finished J, I was reading Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog post about Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's 1970 Rap on Race, during which Baldwin drove home the same point with which Jacobson wrestles in J: "It is a curious way to find your identity, labeling yourself by labeling all the things that you’re not." Does this apparently universal human process of "constructing identity by the deliberate exclusion of what we are not in order to carve out what we are" (to quote Popova's summary) mean that all civil rights movements are ultimately doomed to failure? What is so spectacular about Jacobson's achievement in J is that he forces the reader to confront this huge issue, not on a national or international scale, but within the confines of the relationship between one man and one woman. What ultimately happens to Kevern and Ailinn's love has haunted me for weeks.
Highly recommended.
I received a free copy of J through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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up the next day to try again. Whether the initial fault was with me or with the book, I still can't decide, but suddenly I was engrossed.The Goodreads description of J compares it to the dystopian classics 1984 and Brave New World, but I think this analogy ignores J's nuanced approach. When I think of "dystopian" fiction, whether it be 1984 or The Hunger Games, I think of imaginary societies which are obviously "undesirable or frightening" (to use Wikipedia's definition) from the moment the reader is introduced to them. In contrast, the society in J, created in response to an event referred to "WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED", initially appears to be a successful utopia in which all citizens are truly equal, having even given up their names to prevent identification with a particular racial, religious, or ethnic group.
"It granted a universal amnesty, dispensing one and for all with invidious distinctions between the doers and the done-to. Time must close over the events, and there is no better way to ensure that than to bring everyone together retroactively. Now that we are one family, and cannot remember when we were anything else, there can be no question of a repetition of whatever happened, if it did, because there is no one left to do to again whatever was or wasn't done."
The reader learns only gradually about the flaws in this plan, as the society discovers what happens when there is an "us" but no "them": "Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all."
This idea has disturbing implications not only for the society in J, but for our own, particularly in the context of race relations. Shortly after I finished J, I was reading Maria Popova's Brain Pickings blog post about Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's 1970 Rap on Race, during which Baldwin drove home the same point with which Jacobson wrestles in J: "It is a curious way to find your identity, labeling yourself by labeling all the things that you’re not." Does this apparently universal human process of "constructing identity by the deliberate exclusion of what we are not in order to carve out what we are" (to quote Popova's summary) mean that all civil rights movements are ultimately doomed to failure? What is so spectacular about Jacobson's achievement in J is that he forces the reader to confront this huge issue, not on a national or international scale, but within the confines of the relationship between one man and one woman. What ultimately happens to Kevern and Ailinn's love has haunted me for weeks.
Highly recommended.
I received a free copy of J through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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LibraryThing member avanders
It just wasn't really good. I didn't think it delivered what it promised, though I know others have really enjoyed it. Overall, I found it depressing, and I was disappointed.
LibraryThing member AllisonBall
I had a hard time getting into this book. I very much wanted to like this book, and even was really exciting, anticipating it's arrival. I was especially excited about reading this particular book because I'm a big fan of the novel 1984. This book has been compared to 1984 and I disagree. This book
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is certainly a dystopian novel, however it was hard to follow for me and not really on par with a novel like 1984. Show Less
LibraryThing member HighCountry
When I read the review by AllisonBall, I thought, "That's exactly how I felt!"
And then I read the glowing review by McKeown and thought, "Oh yes, there was THAT interesting detail and THAT one, too." There are so many intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting details in this novel but the
And then I read the glowing review by McKeown and thought, "Oh yes, there was THAT interesting detail and THAT one, too." There are so many intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting details in this novel but the
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characters failed to elicit any emotion for me - not dislike or like - so it's difficult to care what happens next. Even worse when there are many pages when little happens along the way. Show Less
LibraryThing member Bookwormthings
Complicated, good, but complicated when dealing with the literary conceit of choosing not to remember vs dealing with the memory.
LibraryThing member ibkennedy
Difficult to fellow, sometimes
LibraryThing member pivic
The dialogue is everything in this book; the stories are OK, but the dialogue is the best. To me, Sam Lipsyte produces better fiction but the dialogue us the enthralling stuff. I tired of the book towards the end.
ISBN
0553419552 / 9780553419559