NP: House of Meetings by Martin Amis

[bekah]

Just finished House of Meetings,  an incredible,  powerful, violent, 
horrific, mesmerizing book by Martin Amis.  It's really not like 
anything else he's ever written - he's totally serious. 

The overarching theme may be what happens to love  when murder, 
torture, rape, slave labor, starvation and general brutality are the 
order of the day and virtually, but not absolutely,  necessary for 
survival.  

House of Meetings is essentially a letter by an unnamed Russian 
narrator as he travels from his adopted home in the  US back to a 
labor camp in Siberia where he was interred under Stalin.   The 
letter is to his step-daughter, Venus, and in it the narrator tries 
to explain his life as a Soviet soldier in WWII and a prisoner in a 
Siberian labor camp afterward.  He tells her all about his life and 
loves while he broad-brushes (but doesn't hide)  his crimes. 

lAmis tries to convince the Venus to wear the "Eastern eyes" of 
Joseph Conrad for the tale but I'm not sure if this is so that she 
will harden her sensitivities or if it's to request she not condemn 
him too much - possibly both.  She, and we?,  should accept the 
brutality in order to forgive him his part.  

The story the narrator relates focuses on the complex love/hate 
relationship of the narrator for his pacifist brother, Lev,  and also 
for a flamboyant and promiscuous woman named Zoya who marries Lev. 
The title of the book is from the name of the building where conjugal 
visits are allowed.

The characters are never really fully developed, the structure is 
shredded and the themes of love, forgiveness and redemption are never 
quite resolved,  but the narrative style is superb and the book 
succeeds.   In many ways "House of Meetings" reminded me of a 
combination of William Vollmann (Europe Central) and Phillip Roth 
(American Pastoral); Vollman because of the Russian setting,   Roth 
because of the intimate and immediate nature of the personal conflict.

There seem to be a lot of layers of meaning in this book, so it's 
probably begging for me to read it again.  (g)   And it has the sort 
of encyclopedic feel that makes me want to goon  Google marathon. 
Fwiw, many people, places, incidents are absolutely historical or 
literary (Amis wrote a non-fiction about Siberian labor camps a few 
years ago)  while others are purely fictional.   There were times 
when the literary references,  especially to Dostoevsky,  and 
historical references seemed to be a bit overdone.

"We were very late, you see, to develop a language of feeling; the 
process was arrested after barely a century , and now all the implied 
associations and resonances are lost.  I must just say that it does 
feel consistently euphemistic - telling my story in English, and in 
old-style English. English, what's more. My story would be even worse 
in Russian. For it is truly a tale of gutturals and nasals and 
whistling sibilants."   (p. 15)


Bekah



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