Intriguing
Passages
Love starts out as a revolution, then come the chains and
the ambiguities, bringing in their wake the temptation of escape, escape from
love, escape from family, escape from the chains (111).
Manea gave a lot of
really pithy insights throughout this book . . . so many that I couldn’t even
write them all down, but this was one that stuck with me. I appreciated the way love is examined here
as an evolution, instead of a constant current, and furthermore as something
which ends in dilemma, instead of bliss.
He was carefully cleaning each part of Father’s
feces-smeared body—the bony arms, the waxen thighs, the flabby buttocks, the
glassy knees. The young German was
carefully wiping the old Jew clean of the dirt that the Nazi posters had once
heaped on him (378).
Definitely the
hallmark moment of the whole novel, for me.
There were actually several passages that addressed ‘shit’ in a
meaningful context, and I started to think about what it means to be confronted
with someone else’s shit, someone else’s most disgusting, putrefying element .
. . what you do with that, how you react to it speaks volumes about your capacity
for benevolence. But this scene was a
huge payoff for me. And it’s so
beautifully, carefully wrought.
New Words
phylacteries - 2. (in the early Christian church) a receptacle containing a holy relic. 3.
an
amulet, charm,
or safeguard
against harm
or danger.
anamnesis - the recollection or remembrance of the past
asperity - harshness
or sharpness of tone, temper, or manner; severity
Interesting
Dialogue
“You don’t want to go back to a place that kicked you out,”
for example. I needed a coin that would
fit all possible vending machines (48).
“We have no other documentary evidence of our expulsion,”
father said tersely (82).
“If you are still in touch with Mrs. Waslowitz, why haven’t
you arranged to send my former lover a recent photograph so she can see my
receding hairline and potbelly, so she can rejoice over what the ravages of
time have done to her Romeo?” (101).
“You have the honor of being detested,” Baudelaire once told
Manet, admiringly (256).
“You have to be alive to write. Death is keeping an eye on us, and not only
from the offices of the Securitate. The
unheated apartments, the pharmacies without drugs, the empty shops—these are
the masks of death” (259).
“Better tell me about America, but not the America we see in
movies, with all that moronic gun fighting (331).
“The heaps of shit are not easily forgotten,” he had once
told me . . . there are few moments more revealing, he had said, than those
moments when, after a subtle conversation with a friend who overwhelms you with
quotations in French and German, you go to the café’s feces-infested toilet and
are dazed by the mounds of refuse, felled by the stench, horrified by the
swarming flies” (350).
Beautiful Descriptions
to Lear From
Her vivacious black eyes sparkled, the intensity of her face
was transfigured by a magic aura whose origins were easy to ascertain (67).
Effective
Similes/Metaphors
As we were falling, I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if I
had been stabbed repeatedly by a stiletto (56).
. . . the overflowing belly like a badly inflated balloon .
. . (281).
On the corner there was a firehouse, from where huge red
mastodons would race out in a roar (307).
Aphoristic
Prose/Dialogue to Consider
Victimization, the whole repertoire of planetary
complaints. The trauma that happened at
the age of five explains the compulsion that manifests itself at the age of
fifty? Or sixty, or six hundred? Wouldn’t a real grown-up, by that time, have
developed a thick rhinoceros hide of insensitivity? (28).
At that time, in the early 1980s, I was not yet used to
irreversible loss. Wasteful of moments,
I was also skeptical about the possibility of storing them in archives (125).
I relate to this
sinking feeling of having missed out on so much profundity at an early
age. Wish I had started journaling
sooner, etc.
The new world’s principle sounded simple and just: “To each
according to his work, from each according to his abilities” (147).
Suffering does not make us better people or heroes. Suffering, like all things human, corrupts,
and suffering peddled publicly corrupts absolutely (248).
“In Paradise one is better off than in whatever
country. The social system is stable and
the rulers are wise. In Paradise one is
better off than anywhere else” (383).
Was this a surrogate for normality, the metabolism of
duplicity (198).
On Mothers
My struggle with the ghetto was, above all, a struggle
against the anxieties, the exaggerations, and the panic that my mother
possessed to excess, and that she also transmitted, in excess, to all those
around her (209).
I also felt an
affinity to Manea in his expression of the difficulties of his childhood. It made me think of the old cliché, “When mom’s
not happy, no one’s happy.” But on a
deeper level this is certainly true; the mother is the emotional anchor of the
family. Her highs and lows have
incredible impact on the psyches of her entire family.
I place my hand on the cold railing and look at the gray
stone. “I want you to promise me that
you will come back for my funeral,” she had said (361).
This coming back to
the grave site was a wonderful way to end the novel. The angst of that moment . . . remembering a
promise made long ago, the deadline for keeping it long since passed, the
present reconciliation with both the motherland and the mother herself arriving
much to late.
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