House of Meetings

New Words

rictus: the gape of the mouth (of a bird)

invidious: calculated to create ill will or resentment

intercrural: pertaining to the leg or the hind limb

tumescent: swelling, tumid; exhibiting or affected with many ideas or emotions; teeming

saturnalia: unrestrained revelry; orgy

amatory: of or pertaining to lovers or lovemaking

moribund: in a dying state; near death

Passages for Discussion:

That’s how a “love triangle” could be wonderfully simplified.  An anonymous phone call, or an unsigned letter, to the secret police.  You kept expecting it, but there she was, every day, not in camp or in prison but on the street, with the same smile, the same walk (37).

. . . in the four of five seconds between my kiss and her awakening, Zoya was dreaming about Lev.  It had to be that way, to crystallize his fate and mine (241).

You know what happened to us, brother?  It wasn’t just a compendium of very bad experiences. The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness—that was general, and standard-issue.  That was off the rack.  What I’m referring to is the destiny that is made to measure.  Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there (233).

Fascinating Quotes/Prose

When you get a wound as bad as that, for the first hour you don’t know whether you’re a man or a woman (or whether you’re old or yound, or who your father was or what your name is).  Even so, an inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell—because this story is a love story.  All right, Russian love.  But still love (9).

My eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Easter.  I am back in the bosom of a vast slum family (15).

There it is in front of me on the screen of my computer, the graph with its two crinkly lines intersecting, one pink, one blue.  The birth rate, the death rate.  They call it the Russian cross (17).

But then he gave me the look I knew well: the mirthless rictus, with the two inverted chevrons in the middle of his brow (19).

           

Imagine that hibernatory quiet, that noisome stasis.  Then comes a whiplash, a convulsion of fantastic instantaneity; and after hald a second one of the crocodiles is over in the corner, rigid and half-dead with shock, and missing its upper jaw.  That was the war between the brutes and the bitches (29).

“Free love” was officially classified as a bourgeois deformity.  It was the “free” bit they really didn’t like.  Still, they didn’t like love either (64).

You could just see the corona, a pearly liquid smeared on the tundra’s edge.  The long eclipse was over: fingers pointed, and there was a grumbling, burbly cheer from the men.  And I too came up out of eclipse and obscuration.  I was no longer muffled in the chemicals of calm (80).

The watchtowers—their averted searchlights and their domes like army helmets with a spray of gun barrels set under the peak, at right angles, like scurvied teeth . . . (100).

“. . . Then you could kill me.  And do you know what you’d get if you killed me?’ he closed his eyes and nodded and opened them again. ‘You’d get a hard-on.’” (112).

“. . . One single titter and it would have happened.  The massacre of the laughing men.  I knew then that massacres want to happen.  Massacres want there to be massacres” (122).

It’s all right, it’s all right, I kept mechanically shouting.  It’s all right—he’s only little.  He’s smaller than I am (133).

“You know what happened,” he said. “You and I have been sold into slavery.  All that fucking around with the interrogations and the confessions and the documents” (47).

Right from the start I have fantasized about the pages that follow.  I don’t imagine that you’ll find them particularly stimulating (144).

. . . significant addenda to the panoply of my brother’s attractions.  A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, a perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede; and, most mysteriously, an unvarying arc of perspiration, the width of a hatband, running from temple to temple (154).

“Stop looking at me like that.” / Like what? / “Like the doctors look at me.” / Well, God help me, I had a plan (170).

I saw that she had thrown off the upper sheet and now lay with her right arm under the pillow.  One leg was straightened, the other fully flexed.  A leaping dancer, frozen in midair (195).

And she flowed up from the depths, all at once, her seizing arms, her tongue flooding my mouth, the jouncing shove of her groin.  I thought, with a whisper of panic: one night will not be enough.  For such an inundation—one night, one year, will not begin to sustain it (197).

In my other hand I held a plastic bag.  It didn’t take very long to fill it—with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull.  I was walking on a killing field (217).

She’s not like Zoya.  Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run.  But she never learned how to walk (219).

Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers.  And so it always will be.  Lev (235).

House of Meetings | Peter

Deeply funny and tragic. Of course his craft is paramount when discussing the book, but what I found so amazing was the huge amount of territory in space and time he manages to cover. The crafting allows him to incorporate the world at large--organically. I said this in class, and I’ll say it again—the fact the he managed to incorporate a fairly solid history of the USSR, to its fall, as well as the Columbine shootings in the US (When he compares them to the school hostage stand-off in Russia) is remarkable because it demonstrates his great access to the events of the world.

Hugely interesting, and so dark that it’s impossible not to laugh, because despair would be the only other reasonable reaction, i.e., marching with the rapist army, the man with no hands who tries to smoke his cigarettes, the Russian policy for dealing with hostage taking. All tragic. It resonated, for me, because it really read closer to non-fiction/cnf that fiction. I'm biased, but I think it's credit to the breadth of the book. 

His use of the “you” address was highly effective and properly employed. It’s very easy to use “you” with a heavy hand. Ultimately, I think the device of the daughter is/was largely disposable once he’s off the ground. He knows his reader, and his reader knows Amis is directly addressing them.

Selected moments of greatness:

“Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up on purpose. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain."

-Hilarious because this is exactly what the book does—invents and proliferates pain.

“The middle-aged wrecks I told you about, the ones that won’t go away: a group of them, men and women, stood on the corner selling—auctioning—their analgesics to etiolated youths in overcoats made from vinyl car-seat covers. Then, very quickly, the old get drunk and the young get blocked. Twenty minutes later everyone is crashing and splashing around in the blood-colored puddles infested with iron oxide, used syringes, used condoms, American candy-bar wrappers, and broken glass. They veer and yaw and teeter. And they just watch each other drop. Yes, it’s all gone—the wild dogs have more esprit. That’s right, stay down. No one’s going to lick your face or try and fuck you back to life."

            -Brutal and clever retelling of a boring old platitude, i.e., it’s a hard knock life.

I hope you read the one written, much later on, and from Iowa City, by Janusz. It is sometimes said that these books are “unrepresentative,” because they all derive from the same stratum: the intelligents. All politicals; no snakes or leeches, no brutes, no bitches. The authors are unrepresentative in another way too, in that their integrity, it seems, was never in the slightest danger They lived; and they also loved, I think. Stakhanovites of the spirit, “shock” seekers and seers, they didn’t even hate. None of this was true for my brother and me. And hate is weary work. You hate hating—you come to hate the hate”

            -On the meta level this is hilarious because he’s addressing his book and he’s guilty of creating and unrepresentative work—but it’s written in a compelling manner, as if it was written by a Russian who was there.

“I realize you must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph. And it isn’t just the unvarying morbidity of my theme, and my generally poor performance, which is due to deteriorate still further. No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude—my appetite for generalizations. Your crowd, they’re so terrorstricken by generalizations that they can’t even manage a declarative sentence. “I went to the store? To buy orange juice?” That’s right, keep it tentative—even though it’s already happened. Similarly, you say “okay” when an older hand would say (c” “My name is Pete?” “Okay.” “I was born in Ohio?” “Okay.” What you’re saying, with your okays, is this: for the time being I take no exception. You have not affronted me yet. No one has been humiliated so far.”

            -Powerful read of his audience, great example of his ability to counterpunch.

“Fatigue, undernourishment, cramped housing, and the nationwide nonexistence of double beds: these help. But the chief method of birth control in Russia is abortion—the fate of seven-tenths of all pregnancies. Seven-tenths of these abortions will be performed after the first trimester, and in an atmosphere of great squalor and menace; the need for further abortions is often obviated by the process (variously though inadvertently achieved) of sterilization. Failing that, there is always child mortality: the rate has improved in the last five years and is now on a par with Mauritius and Columbia."

            -Some amazing dark humor to address serious issues.

“Now, Lev was still a married man, and divorce wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Divorce used to be very easy indeed. You didn’t even have to go through the rigmarole required of our Muslim brethren, who got divorced by saying “I divorce thee” three times. In the Soviet Union you only had to say it once, on a postcard. But now, for reasons we’ll return to, both parties were obliged to attend a court hearing.”

            -The notion of divorce via postcard is hilarious.

“And, yes, I marched with the rapist army. I could seek safety in numbers, and lose myself in the peer group; for we do know, Venus (the key study is Police Battalion 101), that middle-aged German schoolteachers, almost without exception, chose to machine-gun women and children all day rather than ask for reassignment and face the consequence. The consequence was not an official punishment, like being sent to the front, or even any mark of official disfavor; the consequence was a few days of peer displeasure before your transfer came through—the harsh words, all that jostling in the lunch queue. So you see, Venus, the peer group can make people do anything, and do it day in and day out. In the rapist army, everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too.”

            -His “honesty” wins trust, although it’s completely repulsive.

“On my front, in 1945, many, many women were murdered as well as raped. I did no killing of women. Not then.”

            -Great example of a trigger.

“The phrase “dirty old man” has two meanings, and one of them happens to be literal. There is a dirty old man on board who is that kind of dirty old man. He may be a dirty old man of the other kind too, but something tells me that the two callings are difficult to combine. Now tell me, Venus. Why do I feel tempted to take the road of this dirty old man? I hate washing more and more every day, and shaving, and I hate stuffing my laundry into plastic bags and writing “socks—4 prs.” I almost burst into tears, the other morning, when I realized I’d have to cut my toenails one more time”

            -A portrait of the author. The bit about toenails. I burst out laughing. 

“The medical officials, after negotiation, are dealing with the dogs and the bodies when the bomb falls from the basketball hoop and the roof of the gym comes down. And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many—the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses.”

            -Unflinching horror.

“There is a young family here at the hotel (they await permanent accommodation): burly husband, burly wife, small boy. They always wear tracksuits, as if expected to be ready, at the snap of a finger, for a run or an exercise drill; but all they ever do is eat. And they are silent and dedicated eaters. I sit with my back to them in the dining room. You hear nothing from their table except the work of the cutlery and the clogged or slurped requests for more—plus the faint buzzes and squeaks of the various gadgets the boy is plugged into (headphones, game console), together with the restless scraping of his illuminated rollerblades. I wonder if they ever discuss the kind of deal they have entered into. The uninterrupted ingestion of food makes it easier to maintain the silence—the conspiracy of silence.”

-Hilarious in the past and present context, particularly because he calls back an earlier passage to the many tracksuit donning Soviets (which were worn because of poverty, the command/central economy, general dire state of Russia.

What will I do with this book? I'll re-read it. I love the rhetorical ability to thrust the "you" onto a reader. Most worthwhile--meaning if the class were a single book--book of the class (barring, perhaps, Malina and The Real Life).

My Son's Story--Compendium

Fascinating Passages

“I don’t want to think about it now.  I don’t want to think he pretends she’s pink and thick and soft; as I pretend, in dreams, that I’m doing things to them, the blondes in full-page spreads I tear out” (46).

For me, this unwanted assimilation of father and son was at the heart of the tension in this novel.  And it goes both ways—the son disgusted by the revelation that his father possesses a sexual appetite similar to his own, and the father threatened by his son’s entrance into manhood.  I felt like a lot of the scorn that Will reserved for his father came out of a frustration of living in Sonny’s shadow.  How appropriate a name, then, “Sonny”?

“The smell of smoke, that was the smell of her. / The smell of destruction, of what has been consumed, that he first brought into that house” (274). 

I really didn’t expect this, which is part of the reason it impacted me in the way it did, but the other reason was that it represented Hannah so well; an agent of chaos disguised as something else.  Disguised as a need, as passion, as something positive to burn with desire for.  Yet even at this moment, Sonny still seems to have no concept of the toll the affair has taken on his family.  Or at least if he does, he doesn’t care.  His domestic livelihood is smoldering behind him, and his mind still turns to “the cause.”

New Words

fecklessly

inveigle

genuflect

diastole

ectoplasmic

Arresting Imagery

Ice-blue sky, yellow dumps, black veld, like the primary colors of a flag.  Our burnt-out picnic.  She would never have known where to find us, there (38).

The shadowless mauve of the jacaranda full-blown, ectoplasmic, near his face, tree ferns airing green wings spread over the pond tiled with lily leaves, the mist of live warmth from cut grass (142).

Notes/Strategies

- Gordimer has a marvelous talent for expressing her familial characters’ emotions through use of details that are specific to each person, rather than simply stating that he/she is angry/depressed/frustrated/smug

            - Examples:

            - I’ll bet I could bring up the questions of a motorbike again now, and maybe I’d get it (46).

            - She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body (61). What a beautiful line that I want to steal.  I’ve never read anything like that before about a mother.

            - Watching Sonny, listening to Sonny, she felt at last she could define sincerity, also—it was never speaking from an idea of oneself (112).

            - They made love again, the kind of love-making that brings the dependent fear that one could never live, again, without it (174).  This tells me exactly what Sonny was trying to accomplish with this encounter.  It tells me that he feared losing Hannah, and this was his final performance in efforts to retain her.

            - But he was mistaken; he’s lost the instinct for sensing my mother’s presence in some other room.  They were empty.  She was not there.  Not for him, not for me (178).

Misc. Quotations I found Striking

. . . not the kind where the vocabulary was limited to onomatopoeic exclamations by supermen . . . (20)

Even Hannah had never before experienced what the blacks, with their rags kept on their persons as protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards, were ready for every day (116).

She never came back.  Cut loose.  She was gone for good: my mother (168).