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A review by ebeeb
The Procedure by Harry Mulisch
3.5
There are elements of this book that remind me very much of Italo Calvino, with passages set in the second person, and more self-reference than you can shake a meta-stick at. But unlike something like If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the story here is much more than mere window dressing for the author’s clever linguistic tricks. Instead, we find a modern retelling of the Frankenstein story, beginning with a chilling recounting of the Jewish myth of the golem. This part was so good it easily could’ve stood on its own as a short story.
We soon settle however onto our present-day Victor Frankenstein — Victor Werker by these lights — who is styled here as a biologist who has succeeded in creating a tiny, complex crystal which is possessed of the most basic metabolism and which also has the ability to reproduce. In other words: life. I enjoyed that the so-called eobiont is rarely discussed directly, however. Instead, the story is much more concerned with the human experience of life and death, and its philosophical observations are often infused with a biting irony. There is a description of childbirth here that nearly brought me to tears.
As is often the case with books that pull out the lexical fireworks in their opening pages, however, the latter half can’t quite keep up the momentum, and the final section especially feels too drawn out, even repetitive at times, while at the same time not quite managing to deal in a satisfying way with all the themes presented earlier. Because of this, I’m not quite sure what to make of this book; parts of it were certainly some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while and really quite moving, but other very sizeable portions had me looking forward to the last page. Overall, I’d say this book is very much worth reading, even if the best bits are concentrated in the first half. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a lesser work by a great author.
We soon settle however onto our present-day Victor Frankenstein — Victor Werker by these lights — who is styled here as a biologist who has succeeded in creating a tiny, complex crystal which is possessed of the most basic metabolism and which also has the ability to reproduce. In other words: life. I enjoyed that the so-called eobiont is rarely discussed directly, however. Instead, the story is much more concerned with the human experience of life and death, and its philosophical observations are often infused with a biting irony. There is a description of childbirth here that nearly brought me to tears.
As is often the case with books that pull out the lexical fireworks in their opening pages, however, the latter half can’t quite keep up the momentum, and the final section especially feels too drawn out, even repetitive at times, while at the same time not quite managing to deal in a satisfying way with all the themes presented earlier. Because of this, I’m not quite sure what to make of this book; parts of it were certainly some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while and really quite moving, but other very sizeable portions had me looking forward to the last page. Overall, I’d say this book is very much worth reading, even if the best bits are concentrated in the first half. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a lesser work by a great author.