Memoir From Antproof Case (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
I consider myself a Mark Helprin fan (Winter's Tale was my favourite book for about a decade), so I was surprised to find myself struggling to love this book. I think this book lacked the transcendence of Winter's Tale, and without that it was too heavy to take flight.Helprin's prose is still enchanting. And while I am as happy as the next reader to fantasize about a Golden Past that never really existed (which nobody does better than Helprin), I found myself chafing against the mood of this book, specifically the way sexuality is used and expressed. It's hard to seriously blame a nostalgic novel for being cliché, but still. Every woman the main character meets is young and stunningly beautiful, and he is constantly falling in love with them based on their beauty alone. Of course they always return his affections, even when they are 50 years younger -- though we are not given any reason why they would. [Helprin neither names nor describes his character physically, which seems odd after page upon page of how beautiful such and such a woman is, or that whole passage about Brazilian flesh being like ripe melons in a hammock.] We are left to conclude from his romantic affairs that he must be just fantastically attractive, which seems to me like something worth describing. Not to address this imbalance suggests that Helprin didn't spend much time thinking about his female characters' motivations, and that while he found it interesting to go on and on about the effects of the women on the men, it is not interesting to consider that the men might have similar effects on the women. But, you know, women. It's not like any of them were in the war, robbed a bank, had murdered parents, flew airplanes, lived in New York City, made and lost fortunes, fled a country, fell in love, or looked back on their lives from old age. Or if they did, Mr. Helprin did not find it noteworthy.Of course I am interested in reading books by all authors, including those who are profoundly heterosexual men. But I found the beautiful woman cliché, which occurred so many times in this novel, to be really tedious this time around, and the rest of the story didn't transcend this problem for me. The adventure was interesting but seemed to keep getting bogged down in unrewarding side stories. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for this book, but I would not recommend it.
This book was gifted to me by a friend's father, and though it's taken me more than a year to finally get around to reading it, I deeply appreciate the gesture.The protagonist is so funny, honest, and imminently quotable that I almost had to break out post-it bookmarks so I could keep track of all the great lines.This book was hovering between a good and great throughout the book, but I think the final sections are very strong and bring the rest of it together in a profound way. Helprin finally explaining what exactly an antproof case is and imparting the knowledge of the Finest School were deeply moving sections. The narrator's dedication to the past, the world he knew, is a theme I've always identified with and admired in characters and people for that matter. He's happy but tragically so. Exile is another one of my favorite themes. His past literally has become a foreign country. Like Mowbray in Richard II, his native tongue of 50 years is suddenly useless, yet he can close his eyes and be back in 1914 on the banks of the Hudson, in a plane over the Mediterranean or Berlin, or on his way to Brooklyn fighting a sniper alongside a Swede.The memoir is a gift to Funio, as his "father" says near the end, not so much a tome of life lessons, but an example of one life. And it's an amazing life, one anyone would be certain to pick up some pointers from along the way.
What do You think about Memoir From Antproof Case (1996)?
My father has been recommending this book to me for some years, and I finally got to reading it after he gave me a copy for Christmas this year.The story follows the convoluted, frequently implausible life of its author from childhood in upstate New York and as a Wall Street courier to an insane asylum in Switzerland prior to WWI then back to NYC to piloting fighters over Nazi Germany then back again to Wall Street as an investment banker and then finally to old age in Brazil after having robbed Stillman and Chase. The one common thread of these stories is the protagonist's ongoing hatred of, and often violent reaction to coffee.So, from that brief synopsis, you can tell that it is quite the unusual story. I am told that the way that the story is continually interrupted by tangents, asides, and whimsical improbabilities is a hallmark of Helprin's writing style.All in all it was a good story, if unusual, and kept me turning the pages to find out what happens next.
—Kevin
I really hate Helprin's protagonists. They're brilliant millionaires (who don't care for money, for it corrupts them!), whom every woman on the earth falls in violent love with, and they do ridiculous things just like whatever.Usually, the quality of Helprin's prose and the story itself can outbalance this problem. This time it could not, and more often than not it was dull.Also what the hell was his deal with coffee? He complains that everyone was opposed to him but maybe it was because he violently attacked anyone who drank coffee. The whole coffee tangent was something that was rarely if ever explained, and it was annoying throughout.This book's being sold back to the used book store. I still love Winter's Tale and A Soldier in the Great War, and I'm open to reading more of his stuff, but this was a real dud.
—Chamberk
I loved this book. It's highly improbable and strange and all over the place, and I loved every moment of it. Its witticisms and observations made me laugh in delight and I wanted to read them aloud to anyone who would listen. Instead, I clipped some of them on my Kindle, seemingly at random:I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.Quite often, people, especially very rich people, are overcome with joyful contempt when I don't know the name of some lousy fucking plant. "You mean, you don't know that this is a palustal helichrysum?" I always reply that these plants about which they are so irritatingly reverent don't know what they are, either.It's a rich story full of adventures, love and hatred of coffee (which I neither drink nor hate), highly entertaining and beautiful.
—Alena
