Though it’s not necessary to start, since there’s a fine glossary here, the more you know about the Russian revolution and events leading up to it, thThough it’s not necessary to start, since there’s a fine glossary here, the more you know about the Russian revolution and events leading up to it, the more this book will resonate with you. Early on this novel’s reminiscent of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, though the writing is better and even blackly humorous at times. Published in Paris in 1939, the novel is about Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution. Actually, according to Richard Pipes (see The Russian Revolution)—and I think Serge would concur here—the revolution was not a revolution at all but a coup d’état which resulted in tyranny.
Victor Serge was the son of Russian political exiles who fled the Czar. He did not set foot in Russia in support the Bolshevik Revolution until 1919 at age 28. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Serge had grown up in the democratic West where speech went for the most part unpunished, though even there he was jailed for his political activities. In 1928 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's rule. André Gide was part of the international literary front that demanded his release. Fortunately Serge had been born in Brussels, which made him a foreign national. Yet as a Communist Party functionary for some nine years he came to know the workings of the Soviet government and its players well. Fortunately we have Robert Conquest's superb The Great Terror to corroborate Serge's vision in excruciating detail.
The novel starts light but graduates into a seething indictment of Stalin and his thugs. Serge reviews many of the accusations his fellow “counter-revolutionaries”—Trotskystes or “Left Deviationists”—were changed with. The general fault, it seems, was wrong thought. And if one espoused such thoughts to friends, or in a classroom as with Kostrov here, you were doomed, arrested, imprisoned and made to confess to the most absurd fabrications: that you were a class enemy; that you besmirched the reputations of the leaders of the revolution, and so on. Serge was himself arrested by the Cheka for questioning so he writes from intimate knowledge.
This may on it surface seem terribly boring but it’s not for two reasons: (1) the vivid police-state setting, and (2) Serge’s brilliant style. The novel is stylistically Modernist, but it is Serge’s astonishing ingenuity and élan, his eye for arresting description, that carry the day. It’s not a genre novel, but it does contain elements of espionage and prison-break tales. This is my third Serge novel. It is not my favorite but I recommend it, especially for those who have already read the five-star works, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years....more
A few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs oA few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs of collectivization (20 million dead) and Hitler's genocide (11 million dead). I am largely unshockable. However, the avarice and deceit of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (15 million dead) has been something of a revelation. I hereby enter his name in my Rogues Gallery roster. It is important that we remember what he perpetrated for his own personal gain. Adam Hochschild's book does an excellent job of registering these crimes in the collective memory. The book has been justly praised. Let me add my own.
Also, it turns out the first great unmasker of Leopold was an American, George Washington Williams. He was a lawyer, minister, popular author and activist. He wrote an open letter to Leopold that was published in the Times in 1890 and which might have saved millions of lives had he been listened to. Williams was a man of considerable intellectual acumen and courage. Largely because he was black, however, he was ignored. I had always thought that that great whistleblower was Roger Casement. And certainly Casement's key contribution is recounted here, as is that of the great popularizer of the Congo cause, E.D. Morel, but Williams' audacious early warning was a surprise to me. I hereby enter his name into my book of latter-day Cassandras, and decree he be given greater emphasis in all relevant texts and courses....more
This was diverting, though not my favorite of the six or so Simenons I have read so far, all on the New York Review Books imprint. Kees Popinga, a butThis was diverting, though not my favorite of the six or so Simenons I have read so far, all on the New York Review Books imprint. Kees Popinga, a buttoned down manager of a ships chandlery in Holland, goes on a bit of a rampage after his boss tells him that he has run the business into the ground. This is the same business, the watchword for rectitude and probity in the little port town in which it operates, into which Kees has invested every cent of his savings. Kees subsequently (inadvertently?) kills a hooker by the name of Pamela whom he has lusted after for years when, bereft of his illusions, she laughs at him. Then he goes to Paris and becomes a subject for the tabloids ("Sex Fiend") as he remains at large for several weeks. However, once the newspapers lose interest and relegate his story to inner pages, he starts to write letters to the editor in which he pathetically tries to keep the thrill alive; his ostensible motive being to explain himself since they "have him all wrong." The book is troubled early on, in my view, by some hardboiled-sounding dialog, generally something the titles I've read are free of. I felt it was very good but lacking in action, and by contrast, too heavy on the ruminations of its protagonist, mostly rendered as free indirect speech. My favorite NYRB Simenons so far have been Dirty Snow and The Strangers in the House. The latter being, in my opinion, dazzling on a sentence by sentence basis. Recommended with reservations....more
This is a fascinating tour of New York's Bowery which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of gambling, prostitution, and nefarious This is a fascinating tour of New York's Bowery which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of gambling, prostitution, and nefarious cons working every conceivable angle on the city's unsuspecting and credulous. It is a breathtaking and enormously entertaining catalog of roguery, well written and researched, that left this reader filled with admiration. Highly recommended....more
Epistolary. First person. Dr. Alavoine, recently convicted for murder, is writing to M. Coméliau, the Examining Magistrate in his recent murder trial.Epistolary. First person. Dr. Alavoine, recently convicted for murder, is writing to M. Coméliau, the Examining Magistrate in his recent murder trial. The convict believes that during discovery he established some sort of connection with the judge. For many weeks the two men and their lawyers sat across from each other discussing details of the case. Now Dr. Alavoine is writing to the judge from prison. He wants the judge to know that his opinion that he acted without premeditation was incorrect.
Dr Alavoine and the village setting in which he practices are meant to evoke thoughts of Charles Bovary. I wouldn't pursue this idea if his given name weren’t in fact also Charles. But this is a very libertine Charles. He screws any female who walks. He kills his first wife with his sexual attentions, so intent is he upon siring the traditional son and heir. Jeanne, the wife, delivers a large girl as if to spite him, though she is in fact quite docile; then she dies. Then the rare thing happens. The woman who will soon be Dr. Alavoine’s second wife, Armande, who possesses truly Madame Bovary-like beauty, waltzes into his life. She is without the flaws of her literary double. In fact, the woman is a wonder. But Charles can only think of women as either whores or sheep. How could he possibly think himself equal to such an amazing woman. He can’t. It is he who's submissive to Armande. This arrangement represents a profound humiliation for him.
His life comes to seem strange. He feels detached, as if he were watching a movie with himself in a minor role. The kindness of neighbors and colleagues, his high standing in the community -- all this leaves him in disbelief. Eventually his low self-esteem blossoms into a grander alienation. He descends into a kind of dissociative state. He sees himself as hungry, but he doesn’t know for what. Certainly it isn’t the comfortable existence at the side of this exquisite woman. He decides to be unfaithful to Armande and succeeds with a fat sleazy hooker who appalls even him.
Then on a professional trip to Nantes he meets Martine. He flips for her. She is submissive--the only sort of woman he can feel superior to. But how does this lead to murder? Martine we learn is heading to a meeting with a well-known rake in La Roche-sur-Yon, where Charles lives and practices. There's no way she can work for that lush, that reprobate, Charles thinks. He takes Martine home to his wife, explaining that she is a charge sent to him by a colleague. Martine moves into the spare room. Armande welcomes her and helps her find a flat. It's all Charles can do to stay sane when at home in his surgery seeing patients. For having Martine in the house with his wife means not having Martine.
Finally, she moves out and Charles goes to see her where she shares the home of a widow. He is the sort of man who gets jealous of a woman's past liaisons. And now that she is out of his home, out of his control, he explodes with rage. Under duress he coerces a confession of dubious accuracy from her about her past. The only way to cleanse her of this past, of course, is to kill her. This will be her deliverance.
Its not hard to see, coming from the home he did, how Charles has missed a crucial part his development. He is incapable of having an adult relationship, but must seek out a barfly half his age to fall head over heels in love with. So when the pangs of love do finally come, he is unfamiliar with them and lacks the emotional maturity to master his primitive jealousies. He begins to lay out his rationale for murder. Certainly, he believes in the distinctions he makes, but to the reader they are gibberish, madness. He’s around the bend, has been for some time, and his attempts to reconstruct, to justify the murder are pathetic, futile, meaningless.
He possesses no ability to forgive Martine much less to forget her past. His god-like attitude is 'why hasn’t this woman better prepared herself for my inevitable arrival?' He takes her failure in this regard as a personal insult. Why has she been so sleazy? Why has she fucked so many men? He reminded me here for a moment of the crazed Eric Roberts character in the film Star 80. As for Martine, from her we no longer hear a peep. She has been subsumed by Charles’s crazy scheming. He is constantly on the look out for “the Other”; that is to say, her previous libertine character. He is determined to beat any trace of it out of her. Any reminder of that previous life — he beats her senseless. Nor is she allowed to show fear.
I came to hate Charles. He is without a single sympathetic shard to his character. An utter dread builds in the reader at the prospect of what he might do next. Certainly death for poor Martine comes to seem preferable. Charles is a psycho, truly reprehensible. I didn't want to spend any more time with him and longed for the novel to end, but it didn't. I think however that this was a flaw in the reader, who does not possess the requisite macabre fascination such fiction demands.
This is good Simenon, though not his best. It's funny, the first person Simenons I’ve read tend to be his weakest. But then I've only read about eight novels or so out of four hundred, hardly a statistically reliable sample. The strongest works I’ve read are rendered in third-person; they are The Strangers in the House and Dirty Snow. Three and a half stars for this one. Recommended with reservations....more
Of the five or six Simenons I've read, The Strangers In the House strikes me as the one generating the most narrative pleasure. A discussion of the plOf the five or six Simenons I've read, The Strangers In the House strikes me as the one generating the most narrative pleasure. A discussion of the plot-line would tell you little about the joys of this volume--it's all in the actual writing--so I'll limit myself to the following. At the core of the novel is a man, Loursat, a lawyer, who has lived a deadened life since his wife left him for another man eighteen years ago. Now, with the commission of a murder that takes place in his own home, he returns to life. He is awakened when he undertakes the defense of an innocent young man and is driven to stands of principle he had previously thought beyond his burgundy-numbed mind. I found the book an emotionally powerful marvel. The final trial scene is handled in a way that seems fresh and appealing even today, seventy-two years after publication (1940). Instead of hauling each witness through the dock, Simenon let's us know of all the preparation that has gone into the defense and, while the prosecutor is prattling on and everyone listens, Loursat mentally makes his argument, mostly by recalling bits of deposed testimony. I don't say this is a striking innovation on Simenon's part, but it is, again, so perfectly executed. The book's considerable pleasures lie in its compression, in the author's ability to emphasize only the most salient aspects of the story. No word, as they say, is wasted. One last note, I have never been so gripped by the simple description of a physical structure since Bleak House. Though Dickens had the luxury of length, Simenon does not. He merely possesses a model linguistic economy. Many thanks to New York Review Books for winnowing this one from the Andean heap....more
An elegant literary thriller. It’s 1937 and D is an operative in the Soviet security services who, along with Nadine, his lover and fellow agent, is sAn elegant literary thriller. It’s 1937 and D is an operative in the Soviet security services who, along with Nadine, his lover and fellow agent, is stationed in Paris. D, who poses as an antiques dealer, is appalled by the slaughter of his friends during Stalin’s show trials (see Robert Conquest's The Great Terror). He sends his letter of resignation prematurely to his superior, and then he and Nadine must run. In a drab hotel on Paris’s outskirts they keep Brownings on the bedside tables covered with silk handkerchiefs, ready for use. The nosy concierge, Gobfin, is an effete stool pigeon right out of Simenon who scares the living piss out of our heroes, who continue to run. There can be little question that Serge’s model for the first section--entitled “The Secret Agent”--is Conrad's The Secret Agent. There are touches of Simenon’s influence, too.
The second part, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” focuses on the story of Daria, another of D’s Paris operatives. She’s just back from bleakest Kazakstan where she has been made to pay for her blameless association with D by years of work with impoverished Muslims. It’s 1943-44. We join Daria in the dead of winter descending into besieged Leningrad aboard a flak-riddled transport plane. Daria strikes us at first as a hypocrite, mouthing the absurd Soviet platitudes. In fact, although I always try to maintain objectivity, I’m afraid I weakened here and began to hate her a little. That’s how good the writing is. She composes journals so heavily self-censored that they’re little more than descriptions of the rain. For no names, no specifics about her many clandestine missions can ever be set to paper. But she’s a different person in private. After D and Paris her heart is no longer in the revolution. Once in Leningrad (one million Red Army soldiers and 643,000 civilians killed) she sleeps — how can she not! — with the athletically slim young Klimentii, a decorated soldier. Daria is assigned a desk job under Captain Potapov, whose long Dostoyevskian speech is a wonder of tortuous ratiocination.
So we find ourselves at a disadvantage, half beaten, yet doubly invincible since we cannot be beaten further without succumbing, and it is absolutely impossible for us to succumb.... ❡My guess is that the enemy deliberately put off the conquest of this position [Leningrad], when he could quite easily have taken it. He wanted to choose his moment, ensure his dominance over a hinterland, seize a great and serviceable port and not an isolated city, requiring to be fed, however little... It was a sensible decision but that moment has passed, never to return. In strategy as in life, lost opportunities are lost for good. The single factor of action with an overwhelming probability of disobedience is time, which is an admirable factor of inaction... (p. 132)
A lovely taste of the 19th century Russian novel here, I thought. Of course, Hitler’s plan all along was to destroy Leningrad, to leave no inhabitant alive for the very reason Potapov cites. Then Daria is assigned to work with six soldiers ordered to crawl across the frozen Neva, behind enemy lines, and capture one or more Germans for questioning.
Part three — “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs” — is set in early April 1945 in flattened Berlin. The Allies are perhaps a week away from occupying the city. We begin in an air-raid shelter. Here is Brigitte, reduced to a tragic existence on the edge of madness, and Minus Two, a street-wise, prosthesis-adorned veteran. There are descriptions of Berlin streetscapes here that will curl your hair, or straighten it, depending. The overwhelming sense of loss, of destitution I can only hint at. This is the section of insanity. Many buildings have fallen on civilians which now reek of their contents. Every night the streets are destroyed but in the morning women and youngsters come out with their crude brooms to sweep up a semblance of the street grid. When the writing dips into the thoughts of Brigitte we are adrift, unmoored, grasping at figments.
Brigitte’s eyes opened again, her hands sank to rest on her knees, her shoulders drooped forward as though with lassitude. A stealthy tremor was starting up at the base of her being, like the buzzing of malevolent insects in the gloom, like the approach of a solitary bomber in the sky. It was only the approach of the nameless terror, senseless, bottomless, lightless, lifeless and deathless, unspeakable, unendurable, ungraspable, imponderable; a wave rising from the very depths of darkness... Brigitte was tearing something to pieces, trying to rip the smallest shreds between sore fingers until her nails were tearing at one another. What more to destroy, how to sleep, where to disappear? She began reeling about the narrow room in short, crazed lunges. (p. 206)
Brigitte may make love to a Wehrmacht soldier, Günther, who brings her the surviving bits of her fiancé’s letters. It’s hard to know, since by this point everything has become so dreamlike. Minus Two combs the lethal streets at night — amid groups of armed rouges, official and otherwise — to see what he can scrounge, for much can be traded on the black market for food. Then the section shifts to a battlefield surgery behind the ever contracting German lines. Erna Laub’s career as a nurse is itemized by way of a dossier review. She’s not very good at what she does. In fact, she’s terrible at it.
In part four, "Journey's End," we return to Daria, now in flight. She is not entirely sure she is not followed. Much of what she goes through here smacks of PTSD. Daria takes ship, moves through American heartland, describing an arc from Brooklyn to the mid-west and south to Mexico. (Where Serge himself made his final home, where he wrote this novel and Comrade Tulayev as well as his revolutionary memoirs, knowing they would not be published in his lifetime. That, my friends, is commitment.) Daria joins D and Nadine hidden away in a backwater under aliases. There’s an overwrought, turgid quality to the writing in thIs part. Meaning often eluded me. I don’t blame the translator since he’s just given us 250 beautiful pages. I think the abstraction probably exists in the original French (I’d be delighted to hear from other GR friends with an opinion). Either Serge did not have time to revise this last section as much as he wanted to do, or he felt this was appropriate language for Daria’s state of mind. Needless to say, I believe it was the former. Even with this stylistic quibble, however, I give the novel five stars and ardently recommended it. (PS Unforgiving Years would make a fantastic movie.)...more
I am beginning to see why Anita Brookner and so many others--the introduction here is by Larry McMurtry--love Georges Simenon so much. He is an exemplI am beginning to see why Anita Brookner and so many others--the introduction here is by Larry McMurtry--love Georges Simenon so much. He is an exemplar of the spare style. This comes across quite well in translation since much of what he writes about is concrete: acts and things, showing versus telling. Though Simenon does have his philosophical flights, they are usually brief. Sartre he isn't, thank goodness. The storyline is simple: a Parisian businessman, fed up with life, drops out of sight, vanishes. The adventure he then has marks him in a way not entirely expected. The following is a cliché said about certain writers but here it is also true. One feels that Simenon does not waste a single word. Everything works harmoniously. He upends expectations, surprises and excites. He entertains. Apparently, he would write about six or seven such books per year. In a bad year only two or three. ; )...more
Second reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years oSecond reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years old and a sociopath of the first order. This is collaborationist Vichy France. The men Frank admires the most are black marketeers, thieves, and murderers, men who brag about snuffing women during sex. Frank starts his descent by killing a fat policeman of the occupying army who shows his avid courtesies to the local whores. But murdering the Eunuch is just practice, a preliminary, and Frank’s way of arming himself with a fine automatic. Next he murders perhaps what we can call his true mother, his old wet nurse, who lives outside of town with her watchmaker brother. Frank’s gripe, though he could hardly say so, is his lack of a father. Frank wants to be a man. His crimes are failed attempts to initiate himself into manhood. Frank desperately needs guidance. That’s why he becomes obsessed with the closest person who might help him, his next door neighbor, Gerhard Holst. Frank is fascinated by Holst. When he finally condescends to approach Holst’s daughter, Sissy--Frank, sadly, is her first love--it is only to question her at length about her father. What did he do before the war? and so on. Later, when Sissy touches Frank’s heart, you know she is doomed. You wait anxiously for her despoliation which, when it comes, is horrendous, the act of a monster. This tale of brute thuggery and homocide in the wartime demimonde is a kind of a counter quest narrative. The anti-hero, Frank, must challenge himself to prove he is a man. What he does to everyone around him, but ultimately to himself, he thinks of as his initiation. His fatherlessness, his isolation among women, appalls him. The denouement, when the occupying authorities finally catch up with him, is surprising in its brevity and power. I found myself exclaiming aloud, something I never do. This is a wonderful novel. It's language is very flat, compressed, and sinuous. I’m glad I reread it. Second only to The Strangers in the House, it is my favorite Simenon. Effusively recommended. PS Kudos to NYRB Classics for winnowing this one from Simenon's huge corpus.
First reading This is wonderful. It's the first Simenon I ever read and I found it vivid, engaging and moving. Dirty Snow is my second favorite Simenon, outranked only by The Strangers In The House....more
Here's a real corker for you. The setting is late 1930s Moscow. Joseph Stalin and his henchmen are in the process of committing one of the twentieth cHere's a real corker for you. The setting is late 1930s Moscow. Joseph Stalin and his henchmen are in the process of committing one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes in the rounding up, framing, trial and execution of their fellow Bolsheviks. This period has become known as The Great Terror. Wikipedia describes it as a period ". . . of campaigns of political repression and persecution . . . that involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants ("dekulakization"), Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons. It was characterized by widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and executions." The toll is estimated to range from 20 to 50 million people. Just think of that for a moment: the difference, 30 million deaths, as a statistical uncertainty.
Victor Serge was the son of Russian political exiles who fled the Czar's tyranny. He did not set foot in Russia in support the Bolshevik Revolution until 1919 at age 28. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Serge had grown up in the democratic West where speech went for the most part unpunished, though even there he was jailed for his political activities. In 1928 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's rule. André Gide was part of the international literary front that demanded his release. Fortunately Serge had actually been born in Brussels, which made him a foreign national. Yet as a Communist Party functionary for some nine years he came to know the workings of the Soviet government and its players well. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is his novelistic expose about how The Great Terror affected the lives of Soviet citizens of all kinds. The ease with which Stalin's "rivals" were framed and executed is almost beyond belief. Fortunately we have Robert Conquest's superb The Great Terror to corroborate Serge's vision in excruciating detail.
The story starts with a young Moscow resident who finds himself in possession of a Colt pistol. When he happens across Colonel Tulayev, who is involved with the current purge, his unhesitating and automatic impulse is to shoot the man dead. Police whistles sound. He flees, is never caught. Stalin and his goons then take advantage of the "public outrage" created by the murder to do away in utterly random fashion with a number of old Bolsheviks. The ease with which they choose others for destruction—and then are subsequently destroyed themselves—takes the breath away. Included in the frame up is Artyem Makeyev who perhaps suffers the least in anticipation of his arrest. He is a peasant lad for whom the Revolution was great fun. Afterward he rises to a position of regional power through relentless ambition and command of the socialist clichés. Kiril Kirillovitch Rublev, by contrast, is a thinker and scholar, a gentle, honest man whom the reader comes to admire. It is through Rublev and others that we begin to understand the terrible campaign of fear and terror they endured while awaiting inevitable arrest. The dread and anticipation of the knock on the door in the middle of the night is something Serge conveys almost too well. He has the gift of making all of the main characters—even the real rats like Intelligence Chief Erchov; Central Committee member Popov; and frameup artist Zvyeryeva—sympathetic.
What I found startling was Serge's consistently wonderful writing, originally in French (translated by Willard Trask, who is perhaps best known for the Herculean task of translating all 12 volumes of Casanova's diaries). And to think he wrote the book while on the run between Paris, Agen, Marseille, the Dominican Republic and Mexico during the years 1940-42. The book credited with first bringing the crimes of Stalin's reign to public notice is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, published in 1941. Victor Serge, it is important to note, was writing his indictment before that, but he languished in exile, died in 1947 and an English translation of the book did not appear until 1950. Susan Sontag writes the informative preface in which she discusses both Serge's fascinating biography, as well as why Koestler and not Serge got all the credit for bringing the show trials to light. This is a fascinating novel that deserves far greater recognition than it has so far received. Many thanks to New York Review Books for republishing this masterpiece....more
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