House of Meetings

I didn't think a book as slim and quick to read as this one could be as powerful and epic as this. Condensing the turmoil and strife of Russian history with a parallel love triangle doomed to the same pain and repeated collapsings, Amis tells a masterful story with a narrative completely free of superfluity, sentimentalism, cliche, and woodenness.

The story runs fast and cuts deep with little recourse to clean cut resolution or apology. Horrific tragedy and the facelessness of state power are shown to the reader as hand in hand, with their simultaneous dehumanizing of the many and deification of the few (or more like the one)and the erroding of the individual in the acidic tides of totalitarian regime under different guises and faces show more and labels.

Basically, I'm now a Martin Amis fan because of this book, and as such I can't wait to read his other works.

This story can be read in so many different ways and under so many different lights, the point of it all, just read it, it's excellent. show less

Prior to picking up "House of Meetings," "Dead Babies" was the only Amis I'd read. I found that novel almost offensively terrible, a shallow, sophomoric exercise in provocation for its own sake. I'm glad I gave Amis another chance, though. While Amis hasn't lost his taste for the grotesque, "House of Meetings" is a fearless novel that isn't afraid to describe some of the twentieth century's worst moments or to tackle it's thorniest ethical problems. It is also, to Amis's credit, compulsively readable and unwilling to waste time or space on sentimentality. The voice of Amis's now-aged narrator rings out clear as a bell from the book's pages, a remarkable achievement in so brief a book that covers so much ground.

"House of Meetings" tells show more the story of two brothers, both of whom are what the Soviet authorities used to call "politicals," attempting to survive incarceration in the Soviet gulags where millions of prisoners met their deaths. It's also an exploration of how different characters might behave when faced with an interminable, society-wide catastrophe. Even the novel's narrator, his brother, Lev, and his sister-in-law, Zoya do their best to survive emotionally and economically in post-war Russia, they are constantly reminded that their deaths - from starvation, the state, or the unforgiving Russian cliimate - might come at any time. Worst of all, they knew their fate may not be tied to any of their decisions, since the Soviet system often doled out punishment and reward in unpredictable and capricious ways. The novel asks whether one can remain human, concerned with love or art or morality, under such circumstances, and whether meaningful resistance is even possible when people must fight so hard to survive. It manages to turn the entertaining, and sometimes bitterly funny, story of three individuals into an effective elegy for the million now-nameless Russians that perished under Stalin.

Amis has clearly done his research here. For millions of Soviet citizens, these weren't just academic questions, and it's discouraging to note that most of the degrading scenes in this novel were most probably drawn from the historical record. He also takes us on a very comprehensive tour of gulag life, describing in careful detail the and subtle hierarchies and bizarre economies that existed among the prisoners. After Stalin dies and the brothers are freed, Amis offers a description of the marginal economic and cultural undergrounds that provided a necessary counterpoint to a drab, unhappy society drowning in bureaucracy. He even takes time to ruminate on the nature of the Russian soul, and, even though he's an Englishman by birth, he manages to tie these familiar generalizations in with his developing narrative so that they seem both accurate and trenchantly sad. Mixed up somewhere in all of this mess, life happens to these characters. Our narrator and his two companions meet, fall in love, have sex, work and grow, even if they're sometimes forced to make terrible compromises in order to do keep themselves from perishing. "House of Meetings," is, in its own way, a testament to human survival under the harshest conditions, evidence that a good story can emerge from even the darkest chapters of history. show less

I don't think anyone can deny that Amis' writerly powers are extraordinary; sentence by sentence he's one of the finest English stylists ever. He wins the war against cliche--nukes cliche to dust--and I would scrounge through his trash to read his grocery list.

Yet I want to trot out cliches about his books: his vision is keen, incisive, crystal clear...yet terribly fucking bleak. I wonder where his heart is in all of this. So I could say that the blood is clearly infused into the rhythms of his sentences, the Nabokovian brilliance of his imagery, the structure of his paragraphs. But where's the love? It can't all be tied up in language and black humor.

But if love were chinks of sunshine pressing through the clouds, he has a place to show more hide behind through 240-odd pages: a character to hide behind genius language, as if avoiding that sunshine in the guise of a novel. Confessing everything to his privileged daughter of the west, the main character is a gulag-survivor, a professional rapist, a soldier of WWII, an older brother. But dare I say it may be easy for Amis to hide here, in this grotto of depravity, considering that subject matter. House of Meetings attempts to swallow the entire Russian character, as if Russia were the main character, and her victims were her people, and all that was and is a literary creation, from Pushkin to Amis, are her victims as well; Amis, through his confessional, seems to say: Russia did this to our characters, to her people. It made us live a nightmare and we are the wandering ghosts of that fatal nightmare.

This is a cruel book. If you get through it to the end, the letter from his brother lets the light in. But it's brief and blinding. show less

This is a dark and frighteningly tender book. Amis masterfully crafts his narrator's voice and the surrounding characters, and his poetic prose makes even the most violent sections of the book both horrifying and brilliantly realized. Certainly, this isn't a book for everyone--the depictions of violence and work camps, not to mention hate, are too realistic to be taken easily. Amis' explorations here, though, are powerful and unrelenting. Yes, this is a dark and violent book built to explore darker issues. It is also a masterpiece, beautifully and written and perfectly conceived.

This book poses a lot of important question about uncomfortable realities - the prevalence of rape in wartime, the greediness of a passive nature, the chance for morality in dire conditions. Overall, I guess this book shows us the dangers of going along with the flow, and the opposite challenges of letting your morality dictate your actions. I struggled giving this book a rating--- there are so many great things about this work. However, except the sections with the Lev character-- I didn't really like it. Written well, engaging characters, leading questions. A lot of good things, but it didn't really come together in a satisfying way.

I had almost given up on Amis doing Amis over and over again. But the prospect of his writing a russian novel intrigued me. I'm a sucker for those slavs. So glad I took the bait, if you can be glad of reading a book so monstrously depressing. Well realized, well crafted, well done. Perfect tone. Hadn't ever reflected so much on the culture of the gulag. Glad my grandfather got the hell out of Russia.

The 4th or 5th of Amis's books that I've read, and it reminds me of many familiar patterns, themes and tones in his work. The prose is beautiful, though more concise in books like London Fields. The narrator is bitter and jealous, in conflict and competition with his brother. Their paths crisscross, one ascending as the other plummets. However, unlike other of his novels that I've read, this book is set in another place and time—in the Russian work camps, which Amis has researched very thoroughly. The book brought this setting and period of Russian history alive for me better than any other work I have read, including A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The grimness and hardship of Russians both inside and outside the camps is very show more well portrayed and while the characters are not cozy and lovable by any means, the book ends up being very affecting. show less