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3.21 AVERAGE
3.21 AVERAGE
Lethem's writing is beautiful. His sentences alone make this book one to read.
Two chapters really stood out to me: the one in which Miriam takes part in a game-show on television, but even more so, her letters from her father to her. Especially the latter was superb in the way it made her come alive through the pen of another culminating in her final response.
However, the story's backdrop turns it into a difficult read. Parts of it set in the 50's just before American communism learnt of Stalin's crimes and very briefly in Nicaragua during the Sandinista's era, these events and ideologies have a major influence on the characters and although terminology gets bandied around, we don't really learn anything about these things.
For instance, what happens to Miriam in Nicaragua is obscured because all we read is what happens to her. We get no why or even how. Just an end-result. Which, for me, made it very hard to feel along with the characters who experienced it.
Lethem's storytelling made the characters come to live. But my half-knowledge about the story's backdrop that is so crucial to the development of the characters made it difficult to relate to them at these crucial times.
Two chapters really stood out to me: the one in which Miriam takes part in a game-show on television, but even more so, her letters from her father to her. Especially the latter was superb in the way it made her come alive through the pen of another culminating in her final response.
However, the story's backdrop turns it into a difficult read. Parts of it set in the 50's just before American communism learnt of Stalin's crimes and very briefly in Nicaragua during the Sandinista's era, these events and ideologies have a major influence on the characters and although terminology gets bandied around, we don't really learn anything about these things.
For instance, what happens to Miriam in Nicaragua is obscured because all we read is what happens to her. We get no why or even how. Just an end-result. Which, for me, made it very hard to feel along with the characters who experienced it.
Lethem's storytelling made the characters come to live. But my half-knowledge about the story's backdrop that is so crucial to the development of the characters made it difficult to relate to them at these crucial times.
Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude were two of my favourite reads in the past year. Dissident Gardens is more ambitious, more serious and more intellectual than those two earlier novels. However it disappointed me. Not a huge disappointment because I did really enjoy reading it but found it a bit hit and miss. It’s not without its brilliant moments and there are a couple of fabulously memorable characters – most notably Rose, the matriarch of the novel.
Rose Zimmer is a Jewish communist. She intimidates all and sundry with her fulsome and frustrated rhetoric, her high ideals. Someone for whom winning arguments is almost a matter of life or death. When she begins an affair with a black policeman she is removed from the communist party, not long before the details of Stalin’s purges are made public and the communist party loses credibility. She thus becomes a political outcast without renouncing her political ideals which she now presses on various members of her extended family, most notably her daughter Miriam and her surrogate step-son Cicero. Miriam describes her mother as “a volcano of death”, as “mothering in disappointment, in embittered moderation”. The first brilliant scene is when Miriam has decided it’s time for her to lose her virginity – “the virginity Miriam trailed around with her was an anchor, one she vowed to cast off before dawn”. She’s out with a boy who she is going to let make love to her because “he’s special but not-special enough”. But they can’t find anywhere to have sex so Miriam takes him home in the early hours of the morning. Before much can happen – “he blurted his gloop into her palm” - Rose enters the bedroom and is quickly apoplectic with fury. She wants to call the police. Her melodrama is unrelenting. Eventually she crawls on her hands and knees into the kitchen, turns on the gas and puts her head in the oven, not for one moment relenting in her furious disappointment at her daughter’s behaviour. She’s now hurling out the litany of the disappointments and betrayals she has suffered as a wife, mother and dissident, still with her head in the oven while Miriam stands by. Rose then has a change of heart. She slips out of the oven, wrestles Miriam to the ground and forces her daughter’s head into the oven. It’s a brilliant and hilarious scene in chapter one of the novel and really gets your hopes up.
There are other brilliant chapters - when Miriam and her not very talented folk singer husband go to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas; Rose in a nursing home with dementia and the final chapter when Miriam’s son is arrested by airport security for having sex in the toilets.
It’s a novel that traces the traction of political opposition and idealism in America from the 1950s up to the present day. The failings for me were that unfortunately not all the characters are anywhere as near so compelling as Rose and yet these less successful characters are given equal airtime. You know that moment when you realise you’re supposed to have a clear idea of who a character is but you don’t have a clue and have to trawl back through the pages in search of clues? Cousin Lenny was that character for me. Suddenly he has a chapter to himself and I don’t know who he is. One problem with this novel is that you could remove a couple of chapters without it having any bearing whatsoever on the novel. This because there’s no plot to speak of. Letham might have written this book chronologically but he then shuffled all the chapters in an order that could easily have been arranged in a different order. I also found it acrobatically overwritten at times. Often he inverts sentence structure (reminding me of late Elizabeth Bowen). What she said I can’t comment on – that kind of thing. So, much that was brilliant but ultimately I didn’t quite feel the love.
Rose Zimmer is a Jewish communist. She intimidates all and sundry with her fulsome and frustrated rhetoric, her high ideals. Someone for whom winning arguments is almost a matter of life or death. When she begins an affair with a black policeman she is removed from the communist party, not long before the details of Stalin’s purges are made public and the communist party loses credibility. She thus becomes a political outcast without renouncing her political ideals which she now presses on various members of her extended family, most notably her daughter Miriam and her surrogate step-son Cicero. Miriam describes her mother as “a volcano of death”, as “mothering in disappointment, in embittered moderation”. The first brilliant scene is when Miriam has decided it’s time for her to lose her virginity – “the virginity Miriam trailed around with her was an anchor, one she vowed to cast off before dawn”. She’s out with a boy who she is going to let make love to her because “he’s special but not-special enough”. But they can’t find anywhere to have sex so Miriam takes him home in the early hours of the morning. Before much can happen – “he blurted his gloop into her palm” - Rose enters the bedroom and is quickly apoplectic with fury. She wants to call the police. Her melodrama is unrelenting. Eventually she crawls on her hands and knees into the kitchen, turns on the gas and puts her head in the oven, not for one moment relenting in her furious disappointment at her daughter’s behaviour. She’s now hurling out the litany of the disappointments and betrayals she has suffered as a wife, mother and dissident, still with her head in the oven while Miriam stands by. Rose then has a change of heart. She slips out of the oven, wrestles Miriam to the ground and forces her daughter’s head into the oven. It’s a brilliant and hilarious scene in chapter one of the novel and really gets your hopes up.
There are other brilliant chapters - when Miriam and her not very talented folk singer husband go to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas; Rose in a nursing home with dementia and the final chapter when Miriam’s son is arrested by airport security for having sex in the toilets.
It’s a novel that traces the traction of political opposition and idealism in America from the 1950s up to the present day. The failings for me were that unfortunately not all the characters are anywhere as near so compelling as Rose and yet these less successful characters are given equal airtime. You know that moment when you realise you’re supposed to have a clear idea of who a character is but you don’t have a clue and have to trawl back through the pages in search of clues? Cousin Lenny was that character for me. Suddenly he has a chapter to himself and I don’t know who he is. One problem with this novel is that you could remove a couple of chapters without it having any bearing whatsoever on the novel. This because there’s no plot to speak of. Letham might have written this book chronologically but he then shuffled all the chapters in an order that could easily have been arranged in a different order. I also found it acrobatically overwritten at times. Often he inverts sentence structure (reminding me of late Elizabeth Bowen). What she said I can’t comment on – that kind of thing. So, much that was brilliant but ultimately I didn’t quite feel the love.
It's weird. I think I like it for its story, the writing style is admirable, but at the same time the writing gets so caught up in itself that I never really have much access to sympathize with the characters, so I never really have much of a feeling for them.
Had to give up on this one since it's due back at the library. It seemed promising, but I wasn't really into it. Don't know if I'll get back to it or not.
Life of the Mind in Queens
Bet you didn't know there was a Jewish socialist commune established by the federal government in the middle of New Jersey in the 1930's. I sure didn't. Or that Sunnyside in Queens was created as a model community. Or that Abraham Lincoln declared that "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much higher consideration..." This was his Message to Congress, on December 1861, six years before Das Kapital.
These are strong enough hooks to get me into Lethem's latest creation of New York lit. I can't help it: I devour everything he produces. It could be that he provides plausible explanations for how we got to where we are - emotionally as well as politically. Or it could be that his use of specific locations gives them, and therefore one's memories of them, some significance never before recognised. No matter, just as long as he keeps pumping out more outer-borough stuff.
Bet you didn't know there was a Jewish socialist commune established by the federal government in the middle of New Jersey in the 1930's. I sure didn't. Or that Sunnyside in Queens was created as a model community. Or that Abraham Lincoln declared that "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much higher consideration..." This was his Message to Congress, on December 1861, six years before Das Kapital.
These are strong enough hooks to get me into Lethem's latest creation of New York lit. I can't help it: I devour everything he produces. It could be that he provides plausible explanations for how we got to where we are - emotionally as well as politically. Or it could be that his use of specific locations gives them, and therefore one's memories of them, some significance never before recognised. No matter, just as long as he keeps pumping out more outer-borough stuff.
I am fascinated with the Old and New Lefts and like Lethem a lot, so I was really excited about this book. But the characters were flat, the voice confusing and the prose felt like it was trying way too hard. The ending was lovely, but it's a shame you have to read the other 325 pages to get there. Skip.
This is one of those books that was on some list that I was supposed to read. And it was one of those books that was TERRIBLE.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to "get" it... but there was nothing and no one in this book that I cared about.
I'm glad it's done and I never have to read it again.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to "get" it... but there was nothing and no one in this book that I cared about.
I'm glad it's done and I never have to read it again.
Rose Angruth Zimmer, Miriam Zimmer, Cicero Lookins, Lenny Angruth. Rose, tossed out of the American communist party in '56, just before Kruschev told the secrets about Stalin that tossed the American communist party out of its faith. Miriam, the spectacular daughter and hippie, and her folk singing husband Tommy Gogan, communing in Greenwich Village your spoiler text and getting themselves killed while communing with Sandinistas and less desirables; leaving your spoiler text their son Sergius to grow up Quaker. Cicero, the fat gay brilliant academe son of the black cop lover of Rose growing up in astonishing fashion. The language dense and perhaps intentionally stilted in part, gave me a giant story of challenging and challenged people. Good to have stayed with; quite a group.