Human Smoke

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"--- Hitler, Roosevelt" (Vineland, p. 372)

Halfway through with Nicholson Baker's /Human Smoke/ (the German edition 
from the library), I want to ask whether you people here have read it 
and what you think about it. Could imagine that Michael Bailey loves it, 
could imagine that Rich Romeo hates it. Anyone? Offlist is ok with me, too.

(I checked the archives, and there are some mentions of the book from 
the time when it appeared, but I couldn't find an actual debate.)

If you don't know the book, you can read the article from Wikipedia 
which also contains links to the reviews from NYT, LAT, Guardian and others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke_%28book%29

Whatever one thinks about Baker's thesis in the end --- that American 
and British pacifists "failed, but (...) were right" ---, the collection 
of material and the way Baker has arranged it is suggestive in more than 
one sense. What impresses me quite a bit is the pacifism of the Peace 
Pledge Union and, especially, the Quakers. Didn't know before how many 
good things the Quakers did in between the wars. It's also heartbreaking 
to realize that lots of people saw what was coming but could neither 
stop the war nor the holocaust. Of course: To read the book properly 
requires to know about the overall picture. And the basic idea certainly 
oozes a smack of revisionism. Especially in Germany. So there's also 
uneasiness in my reading: It's a highly ambivalent experience, but I 
thought it's good to share this nevertheless --

Among the people Baker thanks for questions and suggestions is also his 
agent Melanie Jackson. So Pynchon, and be it just via marital talk, will 
have had influence on the book, although one cannot say exactly where. 
/Human Smoke/ can be placed in between /Against the Day/ and /Gravity's 
Rainbow/.

Walter Kempowski's /Das Echolot/, a 'collective diary' of WW II 
(published from 1993 onward) which  collages on more than 3500 pages 
diary entries, letters, press conference reports and so on, has to be 
considered as the German equivalent to Baker's book in some regards; it 
does not follow a radical pacifist agenda, though, and aims instead to 
collect all the voices of the choir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kempowski

"In 2005 he finished his enormous oeuvre /Echolot/, a collection and 
collage of documents by people of any kind living in the circumstances 
of war. /Echolot/ consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, 
newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been 
collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years."


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