House of Meetings, or Wanting to Kill Yourself

As I mentioned in my earlier post (below), Martin Amis' House of Meetings is a downer. The main character has returned to Russia to die. First revisiting the prison camp where he spent over a decade, a time where he protected his brother even while hating him for having the girl he loved.

The love triangle never really explodes, as I had expected, but that just makes the reading all the more tortured. God, this is a sad book. One of the characters explains, about pity:

She understand, and she pities me. In the end you finsih with self-pity. It's too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you.

Thus it is only fair that Amis evokes the reader's pity as well. These poor broken souls. They are fucked up, and you can't really sympathize with them. But you can pity them.

My understanding of Derrida was pretty paltry, but I remember a main point of my professor's being that Derrida eschewed the center in favor of the marginalia, that it was that edges that had the most meaning. I thought of this when considering House of Meetings. The novel's center - what happens on a fateful night at the eponymous House - is ultimately less than what surrounds it at the edges. What is supposed to have the most meaning may in fact have the least.

Or maybe not. If you've read it, or read other Amis, let me know what you think.

Misery a la Russe

In September 2004, a group of Chechen rebels took more than 1200 hostages - many children - in a school in Beslan, Ossetia. When all was said and done, almost 400 lay dead. (It's a testament to the Russianness of this all that I almost wrote "400 souls were lost.") And as a Russian historian, perhaps I expected tragedy. And it was that weekend, walking by the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Ave., that I saw the memorial wreaths and burst into tears. Painful, impotent tears.

These memories came back to me as I began reading Martin Amis' House of Meetings, a gulag novel. Damn, I was expecting old tragedies, not recent ones. But the narrator has traveled back to Russia, to revisit his prisons and perhaps to repent, right as the siege occurs. Thus it has a place in the letter - which comprises the novel - he writes to his step-daughter Venus. And Amis' narrator has the same dull dread I had:

And why is it that we are already perparing ourselves for something close to the worst possible outcome? Why is it that we are already preparing ourselves for the phenomenon understood by all he world - Russian heavyhandedness? For what reason are our hands so heavy? What weighs them down?

Although this leads me to my biggest quibble with the novel thus far. A gulag survivor who eventually escaped to America. Who is old and cranky. Of course he has issues with Russia. And of course he will generalize about his land - Russians and Westerners have been doing it for centuries... the Russian soul, the Russian craving for centralized authority, etc. But Amis does it too much. He spends too much time opining on the deficiencies of the Russian people. It gets old.

I'm much more interested in his characters. The narrator, back in the late 1940s and '50s, is a cipher of sorts. A survivor. A war hero stripped of his heroism. Not a big thinker. He kind of makes me think of Gleb in Cement, a major socialist realist novel. His little brother, Lev, is an intellectual, a dreamer who survives by stubbornly holding to principal. Oh, and he's the one that got the girl. The love triangle is bound to explode - we've already learned as much. It's just a matter of biding our time to find out how.