House of Meetings

Zusatztext “Vivid and scarifying. . . . The book gnaws at one’s memory. Amis tries to imagine history with the intimacy and specificity that the greatest historical novelists! including Tolstoy! have always presumed to seek for it.” — The Washington Post Book World “Arguably his most powerful book yet. . . . A[n] unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” — The New York Times “ House of Meetings reminds us of Dostoyevsky. . . . A whole dome of meanings! a specific emotional world–hunger! desire! disgust! rottenness–rises around us.” — The New Yorker “Very fine! very moving and easily Amis’ most accessible fiction since The Information .”— The Seattle Times Informationen zum Autor Martin Amis Klappentext An extraordinary! harrowing! endlessly surprising novel from a literary master. In 1946! two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag! a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle! where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator! the sole survivor! the reverberations continue into the new century. Leseprobe 1.The Yenisei, September 1, 2004 My little brother came to camp in 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches . . . Now that wouldn't be a bad opening sentence for the narrative proper, and I am impatient to write it. But not yet. "Not yet, not yet, my precious!" This is what the poet Auden used to say to the lyrics, the sprawling epistles, that seemed to be lobbying him for premature birth. It is too early, now, for the war between the brutes and the bitches. There will be war in these pages, inevitably: I fought in fifteen battles, and, in the seventh, I was almost castrated by a secondary missile (a three-pound iron bolt), which lodged itself in my inner thigh. When you get a wound as bad as that, for the first hour you don't know whether you're a man or a woman (or whether you're old or young, or who your father was or what your name is). Even so, an inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell--because this is a love story. All right, Russian love. But still love.The love story is triangular in shape, and the triangle is not equilateral. I sometimes like to think that the triangle is isosceles: it certainly comes to a very sharp point. Let's be honest, though, and admit that the triangle remains brutally scalene. I trust, my dear, that you have a dictionary nearby? You never needed much encouragement in your respect for dictionaries. Scalene, from the Greek, skalenos : unequal.It's a love story. So of course I must begin with the House of Meetings.I'm sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov , on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain—a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you'd expect a verst to be the equivalent of—I don't know—thirty-nine miles. In fact it's barely more than a kilometer. But that's still a very long ride. The brochure describes the cruise as "a journey to the destination of a lifetime"—a phrase that carries a somewhat unwelcome resonance. Bear in mind, please, that I was born in 1919.Unlike almost everywhere else, over here, the —is neither one thing nor the other: neither futuristically plutocratic nor futuristically stark. It is a picture of elderly, practically tsarist Komfortismus . Below the waterline, where the staff and crew slumber and ca...

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Vivid and scarifying.... The book gnaws at one s memory. Amis tries to imagine history with the intimacy and specificity that the greatest historical novelists, including Tolstoy, have always presumed to seek for it. The Washington Post Book World

Arguably his most powerful book yet.... A[n] unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history s most harrowing chapters. The New York Times

House of Meetings reminds us of Dostoyevsky.... A whole dome of meanings, a specific emotional world hunger, desire, disgust, rottenness rises around us. The New Yorker

Very fine, very moving and easily Amis most accessible fiction since The Information. The Seattle Times

Product details

• Authors: Martin Amis
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 08.01.2008
• EAN: 9781400096015
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-9601-5
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature