Once again I am guilty of loving a book for what are probably all the wrong reasons. The jacket description of Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude mentiOnce again I am guilty of loving a book for what are probably all the wrong reasons. The jacket description of Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude mentions an oppression brought on by World War II, a population redistribution into the rooming houses of London’s suburbs (to escape the Blitz, among other things), and a feeling of claustrophobia that results from this migratory shift, bringing strangers from different backgrounds into close proximity but without the sense of relief that a larger city (like London) would otherwise afford its inhabitants. [There were at most one or two “public houses” in these suburban settings. If you needed to get away from your roommate for a few hours you could enter into one of these establishments but there was a good chance your roommate would end up in the same place.] The premise of Slaves takes its cue from this description of wartime Britain and brings us a character whose own stifling experience living in an English boarding house is one we become intimately acquainted with. Except instead of the book being about these English boarding houses or about wartime oppression in suburban London, and even while it mentions these things repeatedly, for me this book was a voyeuristic peep show into the dramatic tribulations of a single middle-aged woman over the course of a two-month period in late 1943.
And it was fantastic.
It is hard to articulate what it is about a book that qualifies it for me as a “page turner”—whether it’s plot pacing or humor or internal musings that somehow hits the nail right jolly square on the head, I don’t know. But this book has all of those things. It has a slow but steady build to a glorious showdown that left me shaking in empathetic rage and excitement. When Miss Roach wants to punch something (or someone), SO THE FUCK DID I! And when her stomach gets caught in her throat for injustices that she cannnot believe are happening to her, I also could feel my pulse racing, the heat of fury rising to my cheeks. The gall of these people with whom Miss Roach has the unfortunate luck to become associated. Who do they think they are? Their impudence, their self-righteousness, their utter impropriety. We identify with Miss Roach so deeply that we feel each of these outrages personally, acutely. That is the nature of this book that spoke to me. That, along with Roachy’s own sense of self-awareness—she is honest with herself and open to the possibilities of her own faults even while most of us would have difficulty being that way under similar circumstances. Whether the book embraces any larger, overarching context, I have no idea. Nor do I even care! And I do not mean that flippantly; I’m just saying that this book worked well enough for me on a personal level that it could have happened anytime or anywhere—the “wartime-in-Britain’s-suburban-boarding-houses” thing was just a vehicle for the magnificent drama within....more
Which should be readily apparent, because if I were not, this book would probably have received only two stars from me—not aI am in a good mood today!
Which should be readily apparent, because if I were not, this book would probably have received only two stars from me—not as a reflection of its literary quality per se, but rather as a reflection of my own reaction to it.
Here is what happened yesterday: I finished this book and tossed it forcefully onto the coffee table next to me in what may be seen as a transparent attempt to attract attention to myself (which is something I tend to do often) and sure enough someone picked it up, read its title, and asked me what it was about, providing me with a wonderful opportunity to roll my eyes dramatically (another move with which I am somewhat familiar) and ask, “Do you realllllly want to know?” I explained that it was about this aimless young gentleman who decides to kill some time before starting a new job by visiting his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium high up in the Swiss Alps, but who begins to exhibit symptoms of ill health himself and whose visit becomes lengthened by increasing bouts of time until his initial 3-week stay has been stretched out to a full seven years, and that this book was about his experiences in that sanatorium over the course of those seven years. By this point, my enquirer’s eyes were wide with interest and I was astounded. In explaining the premise of a book that has actually kind of bored me, have I inadvertently extolled its virtues? Is this book perhaps more interesting than I am giving it credit for? The short answer to that is, NO! This exchange with my enquirer has merely revealed what I think is the essence of The Magic Mountain—it is a place that appears interesting, a place a reader might wish to visit on account of that appearance, but once there it is a place that traps the reader for seven long years and berates him with its endless philosophical musings and its explorations of moral ideologies, and only upon being finally discharged does the reader discover his eyes are bleeding from all the fork stabbing.
Now I have gone ahead and made it all sound so horrible. The truth is, this book is very well written. It has a lot to say about the cyclical nature of time and humanity’s fruitless attempts to anchor itself against its continuous passing. It speaks of the mysteries of biology and brilliantly relates the starting point of life to an unexplained (and unstoppable) illness. It presents death as merely an extension of life as opposed to its diametric opposite and eerily makes the reader feel comfortable with it. And it exemplifies the importance of spiritual health to providing fulfillment for a life that is by most accounts cursory and meaningless. But at the end of the day, it is a book for the brain, and as much as that may be adequate for some, I need a book with a heart and soul. I need a book with characters I can relate to and empathize with, and unfortunately this book had none of that. So, to the extent that I “enjoyed” my visit to this sanatorium, it is not a place to which I would consider returning any time soon....more
Ok, let’s just cut to the chase. This work, this novel, this brilliantly flowing diatribe of comic vitriol, is a work of pure consummate genius. The wOk, let’s just cut to the chase. This work, this novel, this brilliantly flowing diatribe of comic vitriol, is a work of pure consummate genius. The writing, the pacing, the internal dialogue, the word choice, and probably the translation, too (though that is only a guess)—it is all perfect, perfect, perfect. You people will think I’m joking when I say this, but I am telling you: this book is a freaking page-turner.
Woodcutters is the first-person narrative of an over-the-hill, acrimonious gentleman who becomes reunited with a group of shallow, pretentious, artistic “wannabe” individuals with whom he had once been intimately acquainted, after the death of one of their mutual friends. For most of the story, the narrator sits in a wing chair in the corner of the anteroom of one of these people’s homes, after having been invited there following the friend’s funeral, and silently blasts his hosts for their abominable character and their tactlessness at hosting this party to begin with, as it was initially meant to be an artistic dinner to honor an artistic guest, and only later became an in memoriam dinner to honor their dead friend, as—it should be mentioned—it was only for this latter purpose, once it was learned that the friend had died, that the narrator was extended an invitation.
And that’s it. That is the entire premise of this novel, and yet it is all Bernhard needed to completely knock it out of the park.
For anyone who knows me, or for those who have been following my reviews long enough (why? why would you do that to yourselves?), you might know I’m a sucker for an ambiguous character, or perhaps a character whose motives reveal themselves as contrary to what the character would prefer you to believe. Our narrator would like you to believe, as he seethes away in his wing chair, that he is unlike the miserable hosts of the party to which he had been invited, unlike their vacuous, imbecilic guests, and unlike the insufferable artistic-guest-of-honor who hasn’t even shown up yet but who the narrator has already made clear is insufferable and is unlike him, the narrator, as he sits in his wing chair. But as he continues to rip into these people, you start to wonder...how did the hosts manage to invite the narrator to their party in the first place if the narrator insists he has always tried to avoid these people? How has his opinion of these people managed to change so drastically from the days during which he used to associate with them? And what do these people think of him, the narrator, as he sits in his wing chair ridiculing all of them?
Look, you know what? I’ve said enough about this novel. I don’t like long reviews, so I’m just going to say one more thing: this book is phenomenal, and my only challenge to you, my review-reading audience, is to read one paragraph, just one single paragraph of this novel, because it is all you will need to become as enamored with this book as I am....more
Compared to the stories told in this book, and the stories that surely countless others could tell of their own obsessionAs it turns out, I’m a fraud.
Compared to the stories told in this book, and the stories that surely countless others could tell of their own obsessions with the printed work, I’m like the guy in the back of a Star Wars convention who says, “Oh, I’ve seen Return of the Jedi once or twice, I think!” Because the fact is, you people are out of my league.
And that just might be the difference between liking this book—appreciating it for its humorous accounts of bibliomania and its interesting history of book collecting—and loving it on a level that only someone who personally identifies with the neurotic episodes contained therein can love it.
Objectively, there is plenty to find fascinating about A Gentle Madness, not the least of which is that it offers the healthy perspective of correlating batshit-crazy book collecting with the preservation of historical records. Without these nutsos doing their thing, it is not unreasonable to believe that many aspects of history might have otherwise been lost to the ages. Book collecting is important! At the same time, a majority of these book collectors are people with whom I cannot readily identify. For example, there is an account of an older woman who collected children’s books...thousands of them. Her interests leaned toward the rare, but truthfully she would have accepted anything into her collection that showed signs of being handled by actual, real-life children. You’d think her motivations were rooted in a love for children themselves, or at least in a desire to recapture her own childhood by allowing herself to be absorbed by these books. But nope! Her desire was simply to collect. She wanted no snotty brats touching her books, and she certainly had no interest in actually reading them. The reason I can’t relate to these experiences is that I feel as though I am the exact opposite. I love reading. I will read (practically) anything somebody gives me, or anything that catches my eye. But once I’m done with it, the book itself is fair game. In fact, I would rather give a book away for someone else to enjoy than keep it for myself. I understand this concept is foreign to most Goodreaders who proudly display photos of their bookshelves, or their “book porn” (which—seriously—is a practice that needs to STOP; unless the books are specifically pornographic in nature, they are not book porn), but that is how I differ from most of you psychos.
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