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Rating:  -
Coming Out of the Ice, by Victor Herman -- out of print but still available -- an autobiography of an American citizen who went to the USSR in the 1930's, got sucked into the gulag, and was spit out 30 years later --an incredible story that would be unbelievable if you saw it as a movie. No other book has affected me the way this one did.
Rating:  -
I've noticed a pattern in my favorite novels: they're mostly complex love stories that end badly for everyone concerned. Am I a misanthrope? Perhaps. But leaving that aside, I would like to say a few things about my newest favorite, Martin Amis's "House of Meetings."
First of all, I have to say that I was surprised to be reading a modern piece of "literary fiction" and enjoying it. The kind of writing that I enjoy is not much in vogue these days; too many modern authors seem convinced that deliberate tediousness makes their work "deep." "House of Meetings," however, is a breath of fresh air. The book is all muscle; Amis's observations are wise and incisive, stated with both feeling and economy. If a passage is difficult, it's because the ideas are difficult, not because the author is hiding behind excess verbage.
The force and clarity of his language aside, Amis has an intriguing and tragic story to tell. He tells it out of sequence (you have to expect that from a postmodern writer), but he does manage to make it very clear by the end. The basic conflict is that the (nameless) narrator and his brother are both in love with the same woman; their relationship to her and to one another is the heart of the story. There are two other main characters, however. One of them is the narrator's daughter or stepdaughter, Venus, to whom he addresses his narrative in a rough yet (I think) touching attempt to connect. The other is Russia itself, the harsh country which the narrator seems to hold responsible for the harsh fortunes of its people.
The narration is almost completely unsentimental, to the point that some readers have found Amis to be cold and heartless. Certainly the book contains a lot of suffering, treated more often as a black joke than as a tragedy; but personally, I think that the lack of sentimentality actually makes the book that much more heartfelt. First of all, it suits the character of the emotionally hardened narrator. Second, the emotional appeals of tragedy are so well-travelled that, in a story like this, they are implicit; any attempt to make them explicit would almost certainly have ended in cliche or hyperbole. The emotion of the book is expressed only in the austere beauty of the language, and I think it's best that way.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this book, though the squeamish should be warned that it deals heavily with war crimes and the gulag, and also that none of the characters are entirely admirable. I generally hesitate to compare one book to another, but it bears some similarities to Nabokov's "Lolita" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."
Rating: -
In this beautifully written and mesmerizing book Amis creates the autobiography of a Russian man, a Jew, who has had the enormous misfortune to be born in the late 1920s: old enough to have endured Stalin's purges, old enough to have served as a soldier in WWII (with enough harrowing memories to merit an entire book of its own), old enough to be sentenced to a Siberian camp in the late 1940s as a political prisoner (again, almost a book in itself), and old enough to return to the "new Russia" and amass a fortune. In other words, the history of Russia over the past 75 years, through the eyes of a bitter survivor.
The narrative is in the form of a letter to the writer's niece, who has escaped Russia to live comfortably in Chicago. He is trying to explain what makes Russia so different from the rest of the world, and why its people are so deformed when judged by Western standards. In recent years I've dabbled in reading about contemporary Russia, which requires some knowledge of its history, and I found this tale to be chillingly and compellingly true. I've come to see Russia as a unique entity: large enough to have absorbed both Western and Asian influences to become an amalgam of the two cultures and thus a mystery to the rest of world, earning Churchill's famous sobriquet.
This book is not for the faint of heart; some of the scenes are truly nightmarish. Near the end the narrator tells us that in 1992 the Russian death rate eclipsed the birth rate and it became a dying country, doomed to nonexistence within 50 years. Some 70% of all pregnancies end in abortions and the childbirth and childhood mortality rates rivals the worst of Third-World countries. The will to live, belief in a future, is gone.
In its bleakness, however, one finds through the anonymous -- and perhaps sometimes unreliable -- narrator a love of life, and determination to shape that life whatever the obstacles. His anonymity makes him a Russian everyman, for good and bad. This is an amazing book in its ability to both tell the epochal story of contemporary Russia as well as that of one man trying to survive some of the 20th century's greatest horrors.
Rating:  -
This novel is an exploration of personal morality, and of the impact a horrific experience (the Gulag) and a dysfunctional society (Russia) has on the spirit. Two brothers experience the Gulag together. The older brother, who narrates the story and is the main character, is bitter and even haunted, but is relatively unscathed; the defining moment for him is the final rejection by the woman he has loved all his life. It is his brother Lev who is loved by the woman, adding to the tension between two men who are strongly attached, but have very different moral senses. As in a mystery, the reader only comes to fully understand what the Gulag has done to Lev's spirit at the end, in the letter he writes as he is dying, a letter only read years later as the narrator is dying.
The novel has wit, ideas, and Lev is a fine character. The portrayal of Gulag life is powerful, emphasizing the brutish rather than the physical horrors. I loved the chapter devoted to the narrator's gloating over Russia's national suicide - as expressed in a death rate which increasingly exceeds the birth rate. At the same time it is tough spending a lot of time in the company of the narrator. Also, I find it hard to accept that a person who does have moral sensibilities, as he does, could become a serial rapist even if it is after a horrible war and the women are German, i.e. the enemy. It also bothers me that Zoya always "gets" the narrator, is a wonderful lover, but is unable to detect when Lev starts going through the motions, although Amis explicitly tries to justify it.
For a very different picture of the Gulag, in a fine and "nicer" novel, see Martin Booth's "The Industry of Souls".
Rating:  -
Why use few syllables when you can use many? Why use common words when you can use rare ones? Why write simply when you can write in a convoluted style? The main character is plastic. It's as if Amis created him for the sole purpose of having a vessel from which to pour his pretentions and 10 cent words.
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