Books to Seek Out
Life and Fate
By Vassily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler
(The Harvill Press, 1985)
Grossman is not mad, but his world is, mixing as it does the Heller of Catch-22 with the vibrant Bulgakov of The Master and Margarita, and then grounding it all in a gloss of social realism more suiting Theodore Dreisser than Doestoyevski. The family saga of One Hundred Years of Solititude condensed to the period surrounding the battle for Stalingrad and stripped of all intervening magical distance—and yet luminous when mundane and surreal when horrific. Grossman actually covered Stalingrad as a journalist and was one of the first to observe the death camps as the Soviets liberated them. And yet when Gross writes:
“This spring we were stationed near Sviatogorsk,” Lyakhov told her. “Once there was a terrible whistling right over our heads, but we couldn’t hear any shots. We didn’t know what on earth was happening. It turned out to be the starlings, imitating bullets… the lieutenant had even put us on alert—they did it perfectly.
We do not care if the detail is historically correct, but because it seems emotionally correct, regardless.
The translation of this novel, by Robert Chandler, is note-perfect—Chandler manages to preserve the line-by-line richness of Grossman’s descriptions while at the same time nurturing a fast-paced narrative flow that, intercutting between Stalingrad and other areas of the Soviet Union and Germany, effortlessly slips between characters as diverse as Russian infantrymen, German prisoners of war, Stalin, Hitler, and Friedrich Paulus, the general of the doomed German 6th Army. Few novels, in their mix of black comedy and pathos, satire of the human condition, and three-dimensional, flawed characters, could truly deserve the title of Life and Fate. Most would crumble to dust under the weight of such a title. But not Grossman’s book. Grossman, of course, suffered that most unkind of fates: his book, smuggled to the West on microfiche, was only published after his death. It is almost unbearable to think of the mind that could create a work of this magnitude—a Russian novel of the first order—recoiling day after day from the reality of his novel caught in limbo, written but not published, beautiful and strange and terrible.
Your only hope of full enjoyment lies in reading for several hours at a time. Otherwise, the vast cast of characters will recede into a mist of anonymous ski’s and ivan’s from which you will never, ever find your way out.
House of Leaves
By Mark Z. Danielewski
(Pantheon Books, 2000)
Nor will you find your way out of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, with its stories within stories, its devious subterranean measurements, its extra dimensions. Footnotes stumble through the text like wayward explorers: sometimes a little closer to home, sometimes completely lost-and losing the reader too. Additional text at the coda of the book serves only to provide some lovely epistolary entertainment that, alas, cannot, under questioning, justify its presence in the narrative. Nonetheless, the Blair Witch-meets-Kierkegaard main story of a family that moves into a house only to find that their house is bigger on the inside than the outside–namely, an extra six feet of corridor, leading down into a potentially endless series of labyrinths—is brilliant, meshed as it is with the idea that the photographer head of the family filmed the horrible happenings—and these film fragments are distributed to folks who think it is a fictional horror movie. Apparently, the house, or the space where the house currently exists, has been around for a long time, as proved by this excerpt from a Raleigh-era hunting expedition caught in the winter blizzards:
20 Janiuere, 1610
More fnow. Bitter cold. This is a terrible Place we have stumbled on. It has been a Week fince we haue fspied one living thing. Were it not for the ftorm we would have abandoned it. Verm was plagued by many bad Dreames last night.
21 Janiuere, 1610
The ftorm will not break. Verm went out to hunt but returned without the houre. The Wind makes a wicked found in the Woods. Ftrange as it muft feem, Tiggs, Verm, and I take comfort in the found. I fear much more the filence here. Verm tellf me he dreamt of Bones last night. I dreame of the Sunne.
22 Janiuere, 1610
We are dying. No food. No fhelter. Tiggs dreamt he faw all fnow about us turn Red with blood.
And then the last entry:
23 Janiuere, 1610
Ftaires! We have found ftaires!
