With its Dostoevskian anti-hero and its willingness to explore the essence of humanity in the depths of degradation, Martin Amis’ House of Meetings may be the best Russian novel ever written by an Englishman. In 2002, Amis published a slim non-fiction volume, Koba the Dread, in which he took liberal intellectuals to task for mostly downplaying Stalin’s tyranny in comparison to Hitler’s. It’s a comparison that still weighs on Amis’ mind in his new novel. The narrator, a Russian gulag survivor, recalls a discussion he had with his daughter about a paper she was writing for college. The question: “in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, who was more disgusting, Russia or Germany? They were, I said. Much more disgusting. … Still, they recovered and we did not. Germany isn’t withering away, as Russia is. Rigorous atonement … reduces the weight of the offense. … In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004, is still the same offense.” The narrator himself has much to atone for. Born in 1919, he is now “a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man – huge and shaggy, my hair not the downy white of the unprotesting dotard but a jagged and bitter gray.” He fought in World War II and, he tells us, “in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany.” But though he was a Communist Party member, he was sent to the gulag, north of the Arctic Circle, as a “socially hostile element” – meaning he had too much experience of the West to be trusted. Released in 1958, he enriched himself in the underground economy. “I had drive,” he says, “and all Russians hate that.” The novel is cast as a memoir addressed to the narrator’s daughter. In it, he revisits the site of his 14-year imprisonment, this time as a tourist – he overhears a stewardess referring to him as “the Gulag bore in 2B.” He discovers that the place where the prison camp stood has metamorphosed into a different kind of hell, an industrialized nightmare of unchecked pollution where packs of wild dogs roam the streets. “Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.” Obviously, the narrator hasn’t gone there to sightsee. Instead, it’s part of a quest to resolve a mystery left over from his days as a prisoner. In the gulag, he was reunited with his half-brother, Lev, who was almost his antitype: short, slight, pacifist, where the narrator is burly and driven. What they have most in common is their infatuation with the voluptuous Zoya, Lev’s wife. Much of the novel deals with the ways in which the brothers survive the horrors of the gulag. But the key event happens in the thaw after Stalin’s death, when prisoners are allowed conjugal visits in a place called the House of Meetings. There, something happens between Lev and Zoya that Lev won’t speak about, but promises to reveal one day to the narrator. This secret is hardly enough to propel the novel, and it’s possible to fault the book for a lack of authenticity: Amis’ wit, his tendency to go for the wry and very British epigrammatic insight, sometimes works against his attempt to feign a Russian sensibility. As the narrator puts it, “this is not a country of nuance.” But the power of Amis’ imagination makes up for most of the novel’s deficiencies. He has done his homework – his sources are cited in the acknowledgements. And Amis has understood that his characters are more than puppets in a work of fiction. “I am not a character in a novel … ,” the narrator asserts. “Like many millions of others I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities.” Amis has brought his characters into emotional focus, to evoke the burden that history has imposed on Russia and the Russians. “Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run,” the narrator says. “But she never learned how to walk.”
Si alguien quiere ver mi lado más masoquista, mi lado más victimista, mi lado más depresivo, ahí está Martin Amis. Ah, lo bueno de la literatura, como todas las artes es que mata nuestros demonios o más bien, nos permite vivirlos de una forma ficcionada. Quizá por eso me guste tanto Amis, él me hace sufrir tanto en sus libros… pero lo más triste de la literatura es que uno ya no sabe si sufre por algo ficticio o real, la verdad es que es tan real que eso la hace aun más triste. Formas adecuadas para quien un día decidió dejar lo más posible a un lado, el drama en su vida real.De Amis dicen muchas cosas, tal parece ser un escritor polémico, la verdad es que no me pongo a leer cuanta noticia vaya saliendo de él, a quien asfíxia la prensa. Con este ya van cuatro libros de él que me leo, y la verdad es que cada vez que leo uno de sus libros, me dan más ganas de leer toda su obra. Sus lectores, he leído, dicen (y yo también digo) que es difícil, dramático, depresivo, exagerado, de historias miserables, oscuras; unos lo aman, otros lo odian, parece que pocos son los intermedios, y yo, tristemente, lo amo.Si uno compara la Casa de los Encuentros con la Información o Dinero, puede decir que la Casa de los Encuentros es mucho más legible, menos difícil, más digerible, menos sarcásticamente negra que esas otras dos novelas. Yo lo siento a Amis mas ligero, y quizá por eso mas maduro, quizá sea más ligero porque no quiere ser tan pretencioso como en Dinero o la Información. La diferencia es que este es un libro más triste que cruel, como los otros, es quizá mas humano, sigue teniendo personajes decadentes, pero aquí a Amis se le nota mucha, mucha más empatía con sus personajes, por eso yo le creo que es el libro que mas ha sufrido escribiendo, no se si por los personajes, por el tema, o la historia o todo, lo que si se es que sus personajes son muy, muy logrados.Me atrevo a recomendar el libro casi que a cualquier persona, solo por el hecho de conocer un poco mas como fue y sigue siendo el absurdo y horroroso asunto del trabajo socialista en Rusia, y digo “es” porque en Rusia solo se vive un capitalismo pero con cara rusa. Lo recomiendo solo para ver como los sistemas políticos pueden llegar casi que a corromper lo que uno creería incorruptible en el ser humano, en una sociedad entera, como es capaz de llegar un sistema, un estado, hasta la gente que se cree más indiferente a este (quizá en política sea una utopía y un craso error ser indiferente).Hay muchas, muchas cosas que se pueden escribir a partir de este libro, como por variar, son muchas las reflexiones y temas por digerir de los libros de Amis, también me ha dejado una fuerte confrontación, me ha tumbado. Cuando uno acaba un libro bueno queda un gran vacío, quedan muchos interrogantes en la cabeza, quedan emociones nuevas, queda arto por digerir y procesar. Para mí un libro bueno es el que produce estas cosas dentro de uno.Creo que seguiré escribiendo de este libro poco a poco, quedaron muchos párrafos subrayados, y hasta con notas, podría hacer un largo ensayo, ocioso, de la Casa de los Encuentros. Espero animarme a poner algo de eso en este blog, de pronto, no lo haga nunca.No sé porque no me atrevo a escribir todo lo que quería escribir sobre este libro, supongo que es porque al final o siempre fue muy serio, fue muy triste y muy real también, es como cuando se muere alguien y uno quisiera decir muchas cosas de esa persona, pero no dice nada, no dice nada porque la muerte es algo tan absurdamente serio y triste, que no te deja decir nada, ante tanta tristeza y seriedad sientes que ya no vale la pena decir nada, que las palabras son vanas.
What do You think about House Of Meetings (2007)?
It's not that House of Meetings is a bad book; it's that it is simply not a necessary one. It is well-written and engaging, but doesn't add anything to Gulag literature - a genre populated by works by authentic survivors, such as the stories of Varlam Shalamov, memoirs of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and the epic of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.The biggest advantage of House of Meetings is that it was written by Martin Amis; its biggest disadvantage is that it was written by Martin Amis. To put it simply : there is too much Amis in a novel which is not supposed to have Amis in it. House of Meetings is comprised of a series of letters written by an unnamed Gulag survivor, who writes his recollections of the katorga to his estranged stepdaughter; much of it has to deal with the hardship of life in the Arctic, and the complex relationship between his younger half-brother, Lev, who is also imprisoned there. Both love the same woman - Lev's wife, Zoya, with whom the narrator becomes obsessed.While the book is supposed to be written by an aging Gulag survivor, the voice is Amis through and through. The aging Gulag survivor sounds exactly like the dying writer in London Fields, a book with which the novel shares the same concept of repelling main character and a disastrous love triangle. But London Fields is an apocalyptic powerhouse; it is a repelling book in many ways, but one which is compelling and impossible to ignore. We can't stop staring at what's happening in London Fields even if what's happening are horrible things, but the horrible things in House of Meetings fail to pack near as much a punch - mostly because they have been described before, even by the author himself. Amis wrote a non-fiction book about Stalinism in Russia four years before this one - Koba the Dread - where he does a much better job at describing the horrors of totalitarianism' mostly because he has true historical accounts to work with, and doesn't have to try to mold them into a fictional narrative. Amis is certainly capable of writing passages of dark beauty, but for readers interested in the horrors of the Gulag I'd recommend readers to skip historical fiction and go straight to history.
—Maciek
Always books about Russia make me feel inadequate. This is because most of it is beyond my experience. I wanted to write this review from the standpoint of Jocelyn, the main character's (whose name I forget) English wife. He dismisses her very quickly in about a page, she leaves as she is fed up with Russia. He chides her choice of literature as banal and cosy. This is a bleak read. There is no room in it for the pleasant and cosy. "My brother started smoking early. He started drinking early too and having girlfriends early. Increasingly, people do everything early in Russia. Because there isn't much time"My experience of Russian writing is very limited. Chekov's "Cherry Orchard", "War & Peace" by Tolstoy, "Dr Zhivago" by Pasternak, the folk story of Ivan and Baba Yaga. I do not believe that this is a balanced view point, there must be a gentle, benign story of Russia; does it have to be harsh, tough, unpleasant?This book decides to paint the human side of a rapist. Peer pressure encouraged the use of rape in war. Throughout the book and joking apart "The Americas" are a nick name for the object of the brother's affections, both a woman and a way of life. How do they come off in this portrait of Gulag life, one violent and the other passive? The different factions battle it out to survive the ordeal of losing their youth, aspirations and integrity. A novel of human suffering and survival.
—Jane Ostler
I class Amis as one of the best living authors. From my point of view a work of art should always be about more than its central subject matter, and Amis is the master of the unexpected and exciting digression. House of Meetings is ostensively about a Russian gulag in which two brothers have been imprisoned, but could more properly be called a story about the nature of violence (and revenge), love (and envy), and memory (and its unresolved attributes). I read this on a short vacation to Hangzhou, China, in the cold wintertime which definitely colored the way I absorbed the city (known historically as a place for poetry and contemplation) in these post-socialist times.
—Andrew Peyrie
