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Rating:  -
Wow! Oh, wow!
...
That is all I could say for a while.
That's all I can say even now.
What a magnificent piece of literature. Not since `The Corrections' by Franzen have I encountered such a masterful ownership of language, clarity and depth of thought, and so much, so much meaning. Meaning in the characters and meaning in the ideas and motivations behind their actions.
With this book, Armis becomes one of my favorite authors, at the same level as Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo.
I'm speechless...he gets my highest recommendation.
Rating: -
I read this book greedily, it's very fast paced and is very conversational in tone. I immediately felt a connection with the main character, and was both shaken and horrified by the subject matter in which the three main characters are involved in (trying not to give spoilers). But to see how my own mind got sucked into what happened and how I found myself drawn in to what ultimately was NOT like me, well, it will pull you into it as well. Gives you something to think about yourself, and how you can identify a person, perhaps consider them a friend, but just how much do you know them and what do you condone?
Rating: -
This is one of the best books that I've been fortunate enough to read and I finished the book reading through the night. The author is not Russian but he catches the Russian soul, the times, the colors, the smells in the most amazing, accurate, concise and terrifying way.
I'm of Russian descent and my grandparents were the generation described in the book. There are passages in the book where I did not feel I was reading but listening to one of my grandparents talking to me about those horrific times and the permanent damage it had caused, destroying families both physically and emotionally well into next generations. There is no moralization, no pontification but simply and tragically an account of why Russia did not survive and why there is no reason to feel bad about that.
Rating:  -
Starting this after I read "Koba the Dread" a few years back and recently "London Fields" and "Time's Arrow," I plunged into it with pleasure, if a novel about a pair of gulag survivors can be classified as such. It's far more earthbound than the other two novels of Amis I finished, and expands the insights of life under "Koba" into an initially compelling fictional tale. It also, as had "London Fields," strongly reminded me of Nabokov, but in a different fashion. The earlier novel played with the narrative conventions; this one takes the detached mood, more like "Ada" in its rather off-handed evocations of otherwise shattering events. For instance, a son's death happens in the Soviet-Afghan war in Salang Tunnel as do the deaths of rebelling slave laborers at Norlag as if off-stage, and this begins to diminish the power of the more brutal, immediately visceral scenes of camp life or the narrator's earlier relationships.
After a while, I began to notice that I did not care about the key figures in the book much. The love triangle, if you can call it that, allows us to root for none of the sorry participants. We understand why Stalinist life has beaten them down into an attenuated going through the motions, but Amis rarely concentrates this difficult, entropic, state into words that move us. For example, the narrator falls for an English woman, Jocelyn, with her beloved four big Georgian poetry anthologies: here's a lost chance to inject wit and edge into the plot, but their simpering potential fizzles. Especially after the storyteller's release, the women he takes up prove remarkably uninteresting, and only Ananias manages for a few pages to leap out of the gloom as a garish caricature that reminds you of Amis' skill to satirize when he sets his mind to it.
Here's one passage that summed up best the book's attempt at a commentary on Russia. "Between 1946 and 1957 I ate two apples, one in 1949 and one in 1955. Now I went to however much trouble it took to eat an apple every day." He buys these rare delicacies from usually the same seller. "In the queue there were currents of recognition and mistrust. If the line was fifty Russians long, there would be seven or eight who had been away [at the gulags]. There would be another seven or eight who had helped put them away. I would meet the eyes of men and women who agreed what an apple was. I ate everything, the core, the seeds, the stalk." (150)
A great scene, but too few of these make the suffering vivid, rather than existential, in these pages. The narrator tells us he feels like a lab rat let out of a cage, "still rattling around the abandoned lab, long after the experiment is over. And now expected to just live out their lives." (185) A few pages earlier, after shocking news: "I looked into the mirror and I felt I could just remove it, my face. There would be clasps, behind the ears, and it would come away..."(174) The precision of a hesitant voice sharpens such sentences, in Nabokovian fashion. Amis can write well, but too many passages elsewhere rumble on with less memorable descriptions, and it's hard to become interested for long in such a tediously told tale of numbing events far from mundane.
Amis appears to have deadened his own sensibilities in equating his authorial voice with that of his beaten-down protagonist, and the result may work better as a fictionalization of parts of such texts as he credits, such as Anne Applebaum's magisterial history of the Gulags, rather than as a novel on its own terms. When you get a sentence about the titular House of Meetings and its rendered like this, you do despair a bit that such a promising topic turns into an ambitious but rather dispiriting attempt to dramatize the burned-out spirit of a beaten man: "liquid tentacles of injustice and culpability flowing out from the head of the octopus, and you as its beak." (127) Perhaps this is a second-language emigré trying to express himself in English, but it's not the best phrase ever conjured up by Amis. Nabokov could have corrected this, maybe from his exact knowledge of appendages and orifices of many fauna!
(All titles mentioned here reviewed by me on Amazon.)
Rating: -
I'm not fainting fan of Amis who worships that flawless British sentence he seems to have down pat--I merely appreciate good works of literary art. I felt better about this then I did many of his novels, his prose often becomes over vulgar or vulgar without a point (though I have liked tremendously the novels the critics have claimed to be too abstract, like Yellow Dog). What bothered me about it was that Martin was constantly looking over my shoulder to say "look here look here think this think that blah blah" and he never went away throughout the entire story. I didn't feel like I was being lectured when I read Times Arrow, which I've read twice, and when I got past the lecturing I really enjoyed the prose and plot. I finished my first read in two days, I really couldn't put it down after all this time I have been loosing myself in À la recherche du temps perdu, which has been spreading me a bit thin. But I will admit I happily returned to Proust when I was done with this.
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