This review is serving as a spiritual tug of war. The Battle of the Conscious. I really don’t know what to think. I hesitate between 2 and 3 stars andThis review is serving as a spiritual tug of war. The Battle of the Conscious. I really don’t know what to think. I hesitate between 2 and 3 stars and Yeah, I know… I’m a heartless bitch. The guilt tells me to rate it higher because of all the persecution and just plain ol’ Horrors that this kid dealt with. As if I’ve lost some humanity if I don’t appreciate this more. But… another part of me is just not feeling it.
It sort of feels like rubbernecking.
Like, it starts off right away with exploding pet squirrels and just gets more and more unbelievable as you go. I’m not saying that this stuff couldn’t have happened (well, maybe I am, but not to ONE person...)and I am well aware that as a French Canadian child born in 1970’s New England I would have NO BASIS on which to judge the monstrosities that this un-named child endured. But, it’s not really real, you know? No? Okay, then I’m colder than I thought.
I can’t get past the fact that this kid really isn’t ever given a break… We go through about 200 pages of beatings and rapes and mutilations and near deaths and you (me) start to roll your eyes and think that Charlie Brown could take some life lessons from this little gypsy boy.
I felt guilty! I shouldn’t be exasperated by this! I should be appalled! I should be weeping and thanking unknown deities that my lame childhood was all about having to walk to McDonalds and clean the pool. But, what did I do? I started skimming. Blah-Blah-beating-Blah-Blah-hanging from a hook to avoid certain death from vicious dog-blah blah-skinning a live rabbit-blah blah-thrown in a dung heap---Blah Blah---you get the picture.
The only thread of compassion that I hold onto is that I didn’t feel this way when I read Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl or Night. I’m not a monster. (Right?)
Maybe it was the writing style, the dispassionate, removed, telling of these events. Then interspersed with these flowing images of painted birds and sexual awakenings (rape or not.) It was difficult to juxtapose between these styles and stay in the moment. My breath would catch at a particularly moving passage like:
I had seen the end of terror that shakes one until it squeezes the stomach empty of vomit, like a punctured poppy pod blown open by the wind.
Then move a few paragraphs to:
I began to practice walking. My legs did not obey me and I tired easily. One night I heard noises outside. I peered through a slot between the boards.
You lose the rhythm, the fantasy, and hit the mundane again. My addled brain couldn’t handle it.
I read that Kosinski may have gone all James Frey with this and ‘embellished’ the tale but from what I’ve read, he never really said it wasn’t fiction, right? I mean, others fought to find meaning and truth behind the tale. Then there’s the controversy surrounding plagiarism and then all those health issues he had… Poor guy, no wonder he committed suicide. (See? Compassion!)
So, I’m glad that I read this. I have Being There and I’ve been wanting to read that for awhile… not realizing it was the same author. Only now, I’m not so excited. And that’s sad. ...more
I’m a freaking mess. I realize this and I accept it.
Ugh.
Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this tSometimes reading makes me so angry
Dammit.
I’m a freaking mess. I realize this and I accept it.
Ugh.
Why, Jonathan Safran Foer? Why? Why do you do this to me? And why the hell are you so young? I know that some call you gimmicky and think that you are just a phosphoresce in the pannikin (yes, I, too, have access to Thesaurus.com) but I just…just…spleen them. They can read their Anderson and their Coetzee and leave us dreamers alone. I am ‘Team Foer’; others be damned. (I still wish you weren’t so freaking young, though)
The story is fragmented, told through letters and hodgepodges of writings that might or might not be parts of a novel. There is the story about the people of Trachimbrod, which might be Trochenbrod, a city in western Ukraine that was decimated during WWII by a Nazi Invasion. There is the story of Alex and Jonathan and their journey to find out Who is Augustine? And to thank her for saving Jonathan’s lineage. There is the story of Grandfather and Herschel (copious amounts of tears during that one).
And then there are the stories within the stories. The story of Brod, Jonathan’s great great great great great grandmother and her struggle with loving the idea of love and her 613 sadnesses ( “Mirror Sadness”, “Sadness of not knowing if your body is normal”, “Beauty Sadness”, “Sadness of Hands”, “Sadness of knowing that your body is normal”, “Kissing Sadness”, “Sadness of wanting sadness”, “Sadness of feeling the need to create beautiful things”, What if? Sadness”, “Sadness”, “Secret Sadness.”)
The story of the would-be ‘Augustine’ and her house with its many labeled boxes ( ‘Silver/Perfume/Pinwheels’, ‘Watches/Winter’, ‘Darkness’, ‘Pillowcases’, ‘Poetry/Nails/Pisces’, ‘Dust’, 'Menorahs/Inks/Keys', 'Death of a Firstborn', 'In Case')
I loved them all. I love the awakenings and the not-truths. I love the humor and the tragedies and the friendships. I am giddy and heavy hearted. I am in love with the idea.
What I loved most, what I clung to after I finished the book, was this:
Jews have Six Senses Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing….memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and see memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks—when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain---that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks “What does it remember like?”
The idea of memory as a sense. Okay, I’ve admitted it before and will again and again. I’m a shiksa—a French-Canadian/German/NH bred—Shiksa. I can’t fathom the horrors of having the Holocaust in my past, I won’t even begin to pretend to imagine the ramifications. But I can appreciate this idea: “What does it remember like?” Aren’t we all tied to the past? Aren’t all of our future actions predetermined by a memory? “Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.”
So much for Free Will.
At one point, Alex begs Jonathan when writing their story: “I beseech you to forgive us, and to make us better than we are. Make us good.”
We have that power in writing. To take away the bad and to recreate. We usually choose not to. It has to be gritty…fairytales are for the young…we need to set the story straight… we need to exorcise our demons….and so on. Make us good. God, that just about killed me.
And this is why I will always defend Foer. His ability to bring me to this awareness and to break my heart in 300 pages or less.
What was I expecting from you? Certainly not a frolicky day in the park… no Maurice Chevalier dance routines. NoCancer Ward … hmmm… Oh, Cancer Ward….
What was I expecting from you? Certainly not a frolicky day in the park… no Maurice Chevalier dance routines. Nope. I can’t say I was duped.
Cancer sucks. Hell, I’m not spouting some fresh angle on an old dictum. Just nod and agree, folks. Most of us have had some dealings with it, some more than others… it’s one of the nastiest things out there… rots you from the inside out, leaves you to dwell on things left unaccomplished and fills your head with messy words like ‘sarcoma’, ‘carcinoma’, ‘lymphoma’, ‘melanoma’, and you know, the biggie: ‘death.’
So, here it is the beginning of Spring, the most joyous of times, birds tweeting, flowers sprouting... and I’m reading about a ward full of cancer patients in Soviet Uzbekistan circa 1955.
Joy.
Actually, the thing is, it was.
You think that these characters have lived through sieges and war and exiles and now this horrible disease and you still see them grasping at the hope that it's not what it is or what it could be.
There's this great chapter called 'What Men Live By' where each of the characters ponder over the riddle 'what do men live by?' They start to call out responses 'productivity!', 'Professional skill!', 'their pay!', 'Food! Water!', 'Air!' and then you have the quiet ones; 'your homeland' and 'ideals' and finally 'love.' I guess that is the mother load of questions, right? What keeps us going? What keeps us moral? Are we just sheep?
Yeah, I didn't sleep a lot while reading this.
Oleg, who, I guess you could call, the protagonist, the character that Solzhenitsyn models after himself, won me over. We see him struggle with his doctors to have some control of his treatments and then dealing with the side effects (read: Impotence) of said treatment. He comes to the Cancer Ward from his 'perpetual exile' in Kazakhstan and we see how his ideals clash with his fellow bunkmates. His struggle with what life has dealt him with:
"If my life is totally lost, if I can feel in my bones the memory that I'm a prisoner in perpetuity, a perpetual 'con', if Fate hold out no better prospect, if the only expectation I have is being consciously and artificially killed--- then why bother to save such a life?”
Can you even imagine? Hell, I can't even get past my anger at the pedestrian that hits the walk sign and then proceeds to cross without waiting. I need to reassess. Big.Time.
There's another great scene where he is visiting the zoo. He's promised another patient that he will go there and report back, he's just been released from the ward, given a free day to roam the city before returning to Ush-Terek and the first encounters a spiral horned goat. It had stood there a long time just like a statue, like a continuation of the rock itself. And when there was no breeze to make its straggly hair flutter it was impossible to prove it was alive, that it wasn't just a trick. Oleg stood there for five minutes and departed in admiration. The goat had not even stirred. That was the sort of character a man needed to get through life.”
The peak.
Then, he continues on to see a crowd gathering around another cage. Inside is a squirrel in a wheel. ...And there, quite oblivious of its tree and the slender branches up above, stood the squirrel in its wheel—even though no one had forced it there or entice it with food---attracted only by the illusion of sham activity and movement. It had probably begun by running lightly up the steps out of curiosity, not knowing then what a cruel, obsessional thing it was. (It hadn't known the first time, but now at the thousandth time, it knew well enough, yet it made no difference.)”
The valley.
That's it, I'm playing hookie tomorrow. Screw the machine.
I guess you can ask, how can you be inspired and uplifted by this, Kim? (Don't lie, it's there, I can see you forming the words...)
Hell if I know. I was just overwhelmed by the sense of hope that these people still carried, no matter their lot in life. Sieges, exiles, bread lines, grappling with the idea of ethical socialism yet living in a competitive, do better society. Fighting the idols of the marketplace while trying to stay true to themselves. That says a lot.
So, does this:
The meaning of existence was to preserve unspoiled, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity with which each person is born. Like a silver moon in a calm, still pond. You can't know everything in the world, whatever happens you'll die a fool.'
There is little that freaks me out more than the Holocaust. And I'm not belittling it at all with the phrase 'freaks me out.' Growing up in the 1970s There is little that freaks me out more than the Holocaust. And I'm not belittling it at all with the phrase 'freaks me out.' Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I felt sufficiently desensitized enough by television violence to be able to gauge how often I need to shake the jiffy pop and run to the bathroom before the program/violence resumes.
Elie Wiesel's Night brings me back to my senses, makes me hate the cold hearted bitch I've learned to be. And not by some overtly dramatic rendition of the horrors of life in a concentration camp but more of the LACK of it. The down to the nitty gritty telling of what happened during the year that he was imprisoned. It wasn't going for the kick to the gut reaction, more of a confused, inconceivable retelling of day to day events, and this---this--- is what really makes me shudder and be at a loss for words. Hell, words? Who am I kidding? Try coherent thought.
“I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “It”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale lifeless.”
His description of his last encounter with his mother and little sister:
“An SS came towards us wielding a club. He commanded: “Men to the left! Women to the right!” Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.”
Words. The power they can hold is devastating. Yes, not a new thought, not an original one, yet fucking true nonetheless. Buna. Buchenwald. Mengele. Auschwitz. Words, but ones that incite something within. Creepy crawlies or nausea. Fear.
I have met only one Holocaust survivor, that I'm aware of. And 'met' is too strong a word. I was working in a store during college and was collecting payment from a customer who handed me the money and flashed his tattoo. I paled. My eyes darted from the faded black green numbers that served as this man's identity to his face and knew that I was just another gawker. That in that one moment I had created a history for this man. No.. he WAS history. Certainly makes you rethink being pissed off that Sbarro's had left the food court.
I think that my kids will most likely never meet a survivor. That books like Night and Anne Frank will have to serve as an education, a reminder that THIS, in fact, DID happen and that it is cruel and moronic and downright irresponsible to believe otherwise.
I could say that I did have some sense of relief that at least I wasn't alive during this. That I didn't sit back and have some vague understanding of this going on. But, that's not really the case, right? We have Rwanda and Darfur and god knows what other insane situations happening out there---and we're outraged over the price of an iPhone.
“For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”
So, Elie Wiesel's account, at 112 pages, serves as a powerful, undeniable, testament. As simply stated as that.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and tuned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
And in the Preface to the New Translation, he says: “And yet still I wonder: Have I used the right words?'
Why is it when I pick up To Kill A Mockingbird , I am instantly visited by a sensory memory: I’m walking home, leaves litter the ground, crunching unWhy is it when I pick up To Kill A Mockingbird , I am instantly visited by a sensory memory: I’m walking home, leaves litter the ground, crunching under my feet. I smell the smoke of fireplaces and think about hot cider and the wind catches and my breath is taken from me and I bundle my coat tighter against me and lift my head to the sky, no clouds, just a stunning blue that hurts my eyes, another deep breath and I have this feeling that all is okay.
Why? Why this memory? I mean, this takes place in Alabama and mostly in the summer, well there is that one climatic scene on Halloween, but I bet it’s still hot enough to melt the balls off a brass monkey.
It must be the school thing, my daughter just finished reading it, prompting me to give it another go, to fall back into Scout’s world and pretend to be eight and let life simply be.
How is that? How can life for Scout be simple? I mean, she lives in the south, during the depression, she has to deal with ignorant schoolteachers and town folk, her ideas of what is right, what is what it should be are laughed at by her schoolmates… man, and I thought my childhood was rough.
Still, she lives in this idyllic town, I mean, except for the racism and the creepy neighbors and the whole fact that it’s, you know, the south…(forgive me… I’m not immune to the downfalls of the north, I mean, we had witches and well, Ted Bundy was born here…) But, there’s this sense of childlike innocence to this book that makes me believe in humanity… even in the throes of evil. What am I saying here? I guess, that this is a good pick me up.
What I also get from this book is that I have severe Daddy issues. I consume Atticus Finch in unnatural ways. He is the ultimate father; he has the perfect response for every situation. He is the transcendent character. My heart melts at each sentence devoted to him and I just about crumble during the courtroom scene.
Am I gushing? I sure am. I was raised by a man who thought that Budweiser can artwork was the epitome of culture. That drinking a 6-pack was the breakfast of champions. That college was for sissies. He could throw out a racial slur without a single thought, care or worry to who was around. I won't even get into the debates/rantings of a 16 yr old me vs a 42 yr old him... What a role model.
So, I thank Harper Lee for giving me Atticus. I can cuddle up with my cider and pretend that I’m basking in his light. I can write this blurb that makes sense to maybe a handful but that is okay, I am approved of and all is good. ...more
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