House of Meetings by Martin Amis


finished 5/5 - ..... contemp fiction ....... rating 9

Incredible book. Powerful, violent, horrific, mesmerizing. I think 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 necessary for survival.

House of Meetings is essentially a letter by an unnamed narrator as he travels from 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 as well as his crimes which may be all part and parcel. Amis tries to convince the Venus to wear "Eastern eyes" for the tale but I'm not sure if this is so that she will harden her sensitivities or if it's to not condemn him too much - possibly both. Accept the brutality in order to forgive him his part. The cross is mentioned several times with women kissing the Russian cross and Stalin's widow crossing herself at his funeral (fictional) so it seems as though the narrator may be asking Venus (a heavenly body) to pray for his soul? (It might fit.)

The story the narrator relates to Venus focuses on the complex love/hate relationship of the narrator for his brother, Lev, a confirmed pacifist in both the war and the camp, and also for a woman named Zoya who marries Lev. (I think Lev always loves his brother.) The title of the book comes from the name of the building where conjugal visits were 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 another read. And it has the sort of encyclopedic feel that makes me want to Google and annotate all the references. Fwiw, many people, places, incidents are absolutely historical or literary while others are purely fictional. But there were times when the literary references and historical references seemed to be a bit overdone.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 a fter barely a century , an dnow a ll 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.





Posted: Sat - May 5, 2007 at 03:29 PM        

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