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).