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smartipants8's review
3.0
At first I was extremely annoyed by the narrator. he was trying too hard to be outrageous and a "character". Where was the narrative voice of the lovely and stately "Soldier of a Great War" that I read in 1998? But it was the last book I had with me on my trip to Kerala and i couldn't find anything other than God of Small THings in the Kerala bookstore that wasn't a risk. So I stuck with it and it grew on me. It was a good book to read on vacation - so many different things happened in it that you could read a block, put it down and move on, then come back and read another block. By the end I really enjoyed it and the narrator. But I'm giving it three stars because it annoyed the crap out of me at the beginning and I like to drink coffee.
nekokat's review
3.0
Fine but honestly, all the bits I liked, I liked because they reminded me of Winter's Tale.
veniasum's review
5.0
Every Mark Helprin novel may not be perfect, but so far I can't prove otherwise.
I read this as part of my recovery-weekend from my first full semester of grad school, mostly in Center City Philadelphia drinking coffee (ironic, I know) in the rain, in a super-hipster coffee shop where everyone wears the same shoes and no one laughs, except me, crazily in the corner at this book. I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.
I read this as part of my recovery-weekend from my first full semester of grad school, mostly in Center City Philadelphia drinking coffee (ironic, I know) in the rain, in a super-hipster coffee shop where everyone wears the same shoes and no one laughs, except me, crazily in the corner at this book. I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.
tdeshler's review against another edition
3.0
I always enjoy Mark Helprin's prose, but I did get a little tired of the narrator's tirades against coffee and his holier than thou attitudes about many other things.
michaelstearns's review
3.0
A romp, a literary lark, and mostly a lot of fun if a bit puerile in places.
ahsimlibrarian's review
4.0
• Oscar Progresso/narrator with no name (1)
• Reason he is in Brazil, fear of being found (4); teaching English to Brazilian navy officers (6)
• Hatred of coffee—a sin, “devil’s nectar,” enslaving half the world—coffee drinking sends him into a rage (8)
• Portuguese a “baby language,” unlike English “where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything” (9)
• Marlise (15), married her at 53, she 23; Funio (16)—finding out Marlise is pregnant with Funio, not his own (21)
• “If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one’s life the illusion of expectedness.” (38)
• Fourteen, attacks school teacher (42-5)
• Straight-jacket, paraded around Europe, insane asylum in Switzerland (48)
• Miss Mayevska (56), Polish Jewess in asylum, pianist, abhors crickets
• “Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.” (59) “But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.” (60)
• First meeting (61)
• Crime—“a phenomenon of opportunity,” not to avenge but to accomplish, thrill & risk, something for nothing, “for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of escape.” (63)
• “…crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable.” (63)—Has our narrator done the detestable? How would he judge himself given this statement?
• Miss Mayevska dies with her family in the Nazi concentration camps (62)—fixes her like amber in his mind
• They escape to North Pole (65-75)--parting
• Sounds of the city (85)
• 1918—first man he killed, “thoughts martial and I was continually alarmed” (91), why he killed a man, deep aversion to coffee, and “my other difficulty in adjustment has been that from the earliest age I have been congenitally unable to know my place” (92)
• Pope: “God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon Earth.” (96)
• Coffee-drinking Walloon (98), hot coffee on the train in the summer (strange in itself), tried to be polite but becomes sick and accidentally dumps coffee in his lap, kills man in self-defense (103-4)
• “The great loves of my youth—for my parents; my home; Miss Mayevska; for God Himself, undoubted, untarnished, immediate—remain.” (106)
• Stilman & Chase, no tie, naps, etc. (110-111)
• Constance (113)
• Shot down twice, over Berlin and Mediterranean (127)
• Sex: “It was the climax of many months’ testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and perhaps, elsewhere.” (129)
• “Her wealth diminutized me. I was a kept man. A gigolo. A rodent.” (137)
• “I used to marvel at the recollections of old people. How is it, I wondered, that they so often combine the qualities of elegy, fluidity, and economy?…They speak in elegies because they remember the dead, they are fluid because they have forgotten the static that slows the narrative, and they must be economical simply for lack of energy.” (148)
• Coffee—will always hate it, compares the enjoyment of it to heroin addiction, Hitler invading France, perverts enjoying their perversions (153)
• Learns to be a pilot (158)
• Marlise (202), but still pines for Constance and Miss Mayevska, who he grieves for beyond measure as his “union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology”
• How he and Constance split—he did not understand her dislike of children anymore than she understood his aversion to coffee (209-211)-she repeatedly asks him where his aversion comes from and he will not tell her, becomes too enraged to do so—why does he not reveal the roots of this hatred? (213)
• “New York gave me strength. The Hudson gave me strength, being, as it was, my garden of Eden.” (219)
• Pain of divorce from Constance (236, 242)
• “I cannot talk to my wife, because she is only fifty years of age and still imagines that the body can be the fortress of happiness.” (243) “I’m old enough to remember vaudeville but I never imagined that I would marry it. When I was young I assumed I would be coupled with a woman who spoke like a poet…”
• Funio—knows he is not his son biologically, but it hardly matters—“Above all, I want this time in his life to be unburdened, for I have never seen such a beautiful thing as childhood, and perhaps if he is not stripped of it early on, as I was, he will have the strength to live his life untormented.” (245)
• Eugene B. Edgar (251), sniper he killed in self-defense (266)
• “…the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God” (273)
• Finds his ‘brother,’ another man as disgusted with coffee as he is (282), Paolo Massina/Smedjebakken
• Gold vault (303)—they decide to rob it (326), (384)
• Madonna del Lago (338)
• Watoon, filthy English phrases (387)
• Pictures of parents, icons, suffused with memory and love: “As a child I would consider these photographs, convinced that I would have neither the strength and vitality of my father nor the luck of meeting a woman like my mother…And then a bolt of wonderful lightning would strike me and pleasantly ricochet as I realized that, because I was my father’s and mother’s son, I did have a chance, after all, of growing into their strengths and graces” (389)
• Loses pictures upon crash landing in Brazil
• Born 1904, begins telling about growing up in Hudson River Valley, parents, etc. (390)
• Schoolmaster makes boys eat coffee as a punishment (396-7)
• Father a farmer, watched him fail (399): “The ground gives back more or less what you put into it. It was not the ground that had changed, or the substance of what we did, or the virtues, but everything else in the world.”
• Memories like a kiss (403)
• June 5th, 1914—goes to fish from the tower (against his father’s wishes) (405)
• “What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example/” (407)
• Train stops, car with initials (415), parents killed
• “..he was interested in my story because I was just old enough to keep everything in my memory so vividly for the rest of my life that my life would never be my own, no matter how hard I struggled, no matter what I did.” (416)
• Two men jump from car, approach him ask for food, then ask him to go fetch coffee—when he comes back, most of the coffee spilled down his front, they are gone and his parents dead (420-424)
• ***“For a child whose parents are taken from him in this way, the world becomes, if not permanently broken, then at least permanently bent. If, as in my case, the actual murderers are never brought to justice, then one is condemned to live one’s life with the knowledge that they are out there; that they’ve ruined, bested, and beaten you; that they might come for you; that any man with whom you deal, anyone you meet, no matter how smiling or likeable or how good, as long as he is of a certain age, may be the devil incarnate, and that therefore you cannot trust, or believe, or confide in anyone; that your life must become a contest of endurance so that you can live to a hundred, so that you can be sure the murderers will be dead before you, something that you imagine would be your parents’ fondest wish and deepest need; and that when you parents died they did so in terror, fearing that their assailants would turn on you, the child for whom they would gladly die, but for whom at the very last they could do absolutely nothing.” (404-5)***
• Figures out the initials on the train car were Eugene B. Edgar’s—the man in whose employ he has been for thirty years (435)—goes to archives to find out
• Bridge over Hudson, his parents in the way, father wouldn’t sell—kill them as an example (453-55)—“My father never would have sold out, because what was at stake was not money but love”
• Feels relaxed about his plan to kill Edgar: “I can only say, let them help and rehabilitate the murderers of their families, I will deal with the murderers of mine somewhat differently.” (455)
• Corners Edgar at home, confronts him (465), lets him know he has stolen from him—Edgar tells him “it caused me much grief…you don’t have to believe that.” A statement that gives him pause (466)
• “After that, I didn’t want to kill him. And killing a helpless person is the most horrible thing you can do. All my life I have believed that you defend the helpless, protect the innocent, love the child in the man.” (467)
• “I killed him, and in so doing I killed the part of me that was best.” (466)—Love, followed where it led: “My childhood was over, the circle was complete.”
• Flying, crash landing (482)
• “ My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that’s how.” (485)
• Realizes what he has written won’t fit into his antproof case (500), goes to the shop in Rio where he bought it 30 years before, but finds they are no longer being manufactured—is told by stationer “Dah vorld vas different.” (504)
• Tells his son where he can find the gold, hidden in the riverbed (507)
• Money makes people idiots, wants Funio to become who he is before he inherits, gives him a choice (509): “Now you can claim your patrimony, or you may be like me, and quietly do without it.” (510)
• “Coffee is evil because it disrupts the internal rhythm that allows a man or a woman to understand beauty in all things. …I know this, though I have never had coffee. I know it because I have not allowed the rhythm to be altered, and I never will.” (512)
• “I have recounted it for the reason that a singer sings a song or a storyteller tells a story: once you have come to a place which you cannot return, something there is that makes you look out and back, that makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise.” (514)
• “I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one love’s one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, and sometimes, as I did, you learn early that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. Memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. …Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better man, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.” (514)
• Reason he is in Brazil, fear of being found (4); teaching English to Brazilian navy officers (6)
• Hatred of coffee—a sin, “devil’s nectar,” enslaving half the world—coffee drinking sends him into a rage (8)
• Portuguese a “baby language,” unlike English “where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything” (9)
• Marlise (15), married her at 53, she 23; Funio (16)—finding out Marlise is pregnant with Funio, not his own (21)
• “If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one’s life the illusion of expectedness.” (38)
• Fourteen, attacks school teacher (42-5)
• Straight-jacket, paraded around Europe, insane asylum in Switzerland (48)
• Miss Mayevska (56), Polish Jewess in asylum, pianist, abhors crickets
• “Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.” (59) “But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.” (60)
• First meeting (61)
• Crime—“a phenomenon of opportunity,” not to avenge but to accomplish, thrill & risk, something for nothing, “for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of escape.” (63)
• “…crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable.” (63)—Has our narrator done the detestable? How would he judge himself given this statement?
• Miss Mayevska dies with her family in the Nazi concentration camps (62)—fixes her like amber in his mind
• They escape to North Pole (65-75)--parting
• Sounds of the city (85)
• 1918—first man he killed, “thoughts martial and I was continually alarmed” (91), why he killed a man, deep aversion to coffee, and “my other difficulty in adjustment has been that from the earliest age I have been congenitally unable to know my place” (92)
• Pope: “God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon Earth.” (96)
• Coffee-drinking Walloon (98), hot coffee on the train in the summer (strange in itself), tried to be polite but becomes sick and accidentally dumps coffee in his lap, kills man in self-defense (103-4)
• “The great loves of my youth—for my parents; my home; Miss Mayevska; for God Himself, undoubted, untarnished, immediate—remain.” (106)
• Stilman & Chase, no tie, naps, etc. (110-111)
• Constance (113)
• Shot down twice, over Berlin and Mediterranean (127)
• Sex: “It was the climax of many months’ testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and perhaps, elsewhere.” (129)
• “Her wealth diminutized me. I was a kept man. A gigolo. A rodent.” (137)
• “I used to marvel at the recollections of old people. How is it, I wondered, that they so often combine the qualities of elegy, fluidity, and economy?…They speak in elegies because they remember the dead, they are fluid because they have forgotten the static that slows the narrative, and they must be economical simply for lack of energy.” (148)
• Coffee—will always hate it, compares the enjoyment of it to heroin addiction, Hitler invading France, perverts enjoying their perversions (153)
• Learns to be a pilot (158)
• Marlise (202), but still pines for Constance and Miss Mayevska, who he grieves for beyond measure as his “union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology”
• How he and Constance split—he did not understand her dislike of children anymore than she understood his aversion to coffee (209-211)-she repeatedly asks him where his aversion comes from and he will not tell her, becomes too enraged to do so—why does he not reveal the roots of this hatred? (213)
• “New York gave me strength. The Hudson gave me strength, being, as it was, my garden of Eden.” (219)
• Pain of divorce from Constance (236, 242)
• “I cannot talk to my wife, because she is only fifty years of age and still imagines that the body can be the fortress of happiness.” (243) “I’m old enough to remember vaudeville but I never imagined that I would marry it. When I was young I assumed I would be coupled with a woman who spoke like a poet…”
• Funio—knows he is not his son biologically, but it hardly matters—“Above all, I want this time in his life to be unburdened, for I have never seen such a beautiful thing as childhood, and perhaps if he is not stripped of it early on, as I was, he will have the strength to live his life untormented.” (245)
• Eugene B. Edgar (251), sniper he killed in self-defense (266)
• “…the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God” (273)
• Finds his ‘brother,’ another man as disgusted with coffee as he is (282), Paolo Massina/Smedjebakken
• Gold vault (303)—they decide to rob it (326), (384)
• Madonna del Lago (338)
• Watoon, filthy English phrases (387)
• Pictures of parents, icons, suffused with memory and love: “As a child I would consider these photographs, convinced that I would have neither the strength and vitality of my father nor the luck of meeting a woman like my mother…And then a bolt of wonderful lightning would strike me and pleasantly ricochet as I realized that, because I was my father’s and mother’s son, I did have a chance, after all, of growing into their strengths and graces” (389)
• Loses pictures upon crash landing in Brazil
• Born 1904, begins telling about growing up in Hudson River Valley, parents, etc. (390)
• Schoolmaster makes boys eat coffee as a punishment (396-7)
• Father a farmer, watched him fail (399): “The ground gives back more or less what you put into it. It was not the ground that had changed, or the substance of what we did, or the virtues, but everything else in the world.”
• Memories like a kiss (403)
• June 5th, 1914—goes to fish from the tower (against his father’s wishes) (405)
• “What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example/” (407)
• Train stops, car with initials (415), parents killed
• “..he was interested in my story because I was just old enough to keep everything in my memory so vividly for the rest of my life that my life would never be my own, no matter how hard I struggled, no matter what I did.” (416)
• Two men jump from car, approach him ask for food, then ask him to go fetch coffee—when he comes back, most of the coffee spilled down his front, they are gone and his parents dead (420-424)
• ***“For a child whose parents are taken from him in this way, the world becomes, if not permanently broken, then at least permanently bent. If, as in my case, the actual murderers are never brought to justice, then one is condemned to live one’s life with the knowledge that they are out there; that they’ve ruined, bested, and beaten you; that they might come for you; that any man with whom you deal, anyone you meet, no matter how smiling or likeable or how good, as long as he is of a certain age, may be the devil incarnate, and that therefore you cannot trust, or believe, or confide in anyone; that your life must become a contest of endurance so that you can live to a hundred, so that you can be sure the murderers will be dead before you, something that you imagine would be your parents’ fondest wish and deepest need; and that when you parents died they did so in terror, fearing that their assailants would turn on you, the child for whom they would gladly die, but for whom at the very last they could do absolutely nothing.” (404-5)***
• Figures out the initials on the train car were Eugene B. Edgar’s—the man in whose employ he has been for thirty years (435)—goes to archives to find out
• Bridge over Hudson, his parents in the way, father wouldn’t sell—kill them as an example (453-55)—“My father never would have sold out, because what was at stake was not money but love”
• Feels relaxed about his plan to kill Edgar: “I can only say, let them help and rehabilitate the murderers of their families, I will deal with the murderers of mine somewhat differently.” (455)
• Corners Edgar at home, confronts him (465), lets him know he has stolen from him—Edgar tells him “it caused me much grief…you don’t have to believe that.” A statement that gives him pause (466)
• “After that, I didn’t want to kill him. And killing a helpless person is the most horrible thing you can do. All my life I have believed that you defend the helpless, protect the innocent, love the child in the man.” (467)
• “I killed him, and in so doing I killed the part of me that was best.” (466)—Love, followed where it led: “My childhood was over, the circle was complete.”
• Flying, crash landing (482)
• “ My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that’s how.” (485)
• Realizes what he has written won’t fit into his antproof case (500), goes to the shop in Rio where he bought it 30 years before, but finds they are no longer being manufactured—is told by stationer “Dah vorld vas different.” (504)
• Tells his son where he can find the gold, hidden in the riverbed (507)
• Money makes people idiots, wants Funio to become who he is before he inherits, gives him a choice (509): “Now you can claim your patrimony, or you may be like me, and quietly do without it.” (510)
• “Coffee is evil because it disrupts the internal rhythm that allows a man or a woman to understand beauty in all things. …I know this, though I have never had coffee. I know it because I have not allowed the rhythm to be altered, and I never will.” (512)
• “I have recounted it for the reason that a singer sings a song or a storyteller tells a story: once you have come to a place which you cannot return, something there is that makes you look out and back, that makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise.” (514)
• “I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one love’s one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, and sometimes, as I did, you learn early that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. Memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. …Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better man, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.” (514)
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