The Ice Cream Man

Katri Lipson
The Ice Cream Man

AmazonCrossing, 2014

Before us is a fine example of European metaliterature which playing with the themes of human identity and WWII.

The book begins with the shooting of the film in the postwar years in the Czech Republic, where a man and a woman during the German occupation are fleeing the country, but their train is canceled because of the explosion on the bridge, and they are forced to stay in a small village (on the outskirts of a city).

An unnamed actress plays Esther Vorszda and an actor Martin Jelinek plays her husband, Thomas Vorszda. In fact, Esther and Thomas are not the husband and wife to each other, they were forced to create their new identities to not draw attention by the Nazis. They made up their new biographies, and who these two are actually remains unknown.

The shooting happens on location, besides an unnamed actress and Martin a very limited number of actors and movie crew participates in the filmong, including the owner of the house, who gave a pair of fugitives a roof, and a one-legged man who appears closer to the film ending.

In the second part, the author presents us with the film’s plot, which is, perhaps, not a film, but a real story that happened. Thomas and Esther, the people hiding behind these names, come by taxi to the train station, where from they have to take the train and leave. The train is canceled, Thomas decides to stay and wait, the taxi driver is sent back, and Thomas and Esther drag their large suitcases on themselves. Thomas negotiates with a widow, Madame Nemcova, to stay with her for a month.

While the English-language authors chew the last bones of war stories and suck the remaining tissue while looking for suitable candidates for their war melodramas, European writers set themselves more sophisticated and complex tasks, seeking first of all new approaches to the form, not the content.

A Finland native, Lipson tries to destroy all canons of war melodrama as weel as family saga stretching from World War II. The plot of the film that is laid in the basis of the book is fairly standard, even on the contrary, devoid of frills. Two fugitive hiding from persecution live in a widow’s house, then the man disappears (in another meta-layer there is a hint of the reason for his disappearance - he did not run away, but went for the forged documents, and was killed), and the woman is left alone, then becomes the wife out hopelessness to a decent man, whom she doesn’t love.
Thу story is very touching, and if it is only that, a touching, simple sketch of the past. On this layer, let’s call it a narrative layer, Lipson puts two more. The first chapter makes it clear to us that behind the masks of Esther and Thomas the actors are hiding, we assume it. We watch their play, know that it seems to be unreal, the director makes it grim. This layer is adjacent to another, pseudo-actor-ish: Thomas and Esther behind the masks are the real people who have to become actors, to reluctant fictional husband and wife. The price of an error will not be a verbal abuse of the director, but death. Accordingly, never knowing for sure what is in front of us, just a movie or reality, we see how these actors play two strangers who play two people who are close to each other, husband and wife.

A reader accustomed to easy, straight narrive may not like such complexness. What's next is a little easier, though again you need to keep in mind that the events may be real, but it may be some rehearsal to a shooting. Lipson extremely quickly replaces generations, time from post-war changes to post-Soviet, and then gets to the present day. Jan’s plot line sheds some light (actually only obscures which is the same thing) on Esther’s past. Lipson again throws us between layers: Jan could be Esther’s son, and could be the son of the actress who played Esther.

In any case, it does not matter when the film moves to our days, where the final major focus is on the granddaughter of Esther Gunilla, a strange creature either going crazy, or by inheritance becoming an actress.

Our memory casts doubt on the past, it is what Lipson wants to say. Something hiding inside us is transmitted from generation to generation. And yet there is a gap between generations, judging by the structure of The Ice Cream Man. The book is as if glued together from two different novels, and the final cut is a little bit rough. Two parts - the life of Esther and the life of Jan and his daughter - have only a few points of intersection. The thread of the past is lost somewhere in the middle. Both parts are original and charming, they do not have enough sequence between them.

The novel is beautifully translated into English, its prose is elegant and devoid of Britanisms which often spoil the historical novels. Lipson surprises with her book and her courage in fighting cliches.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Chatto & Windus, 2014

In the center of the novel is an Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans, who during World War II was captured by the Japanese and among other prisoners of war built the Thai-Burma Railway, also known as the Road of Death.

The novel skips across continents and time layers, but the main events can be divided into three groups: the life of Evans before the war in Melbourne, Japanese camp and the post-war period, when Evans even received a certain notoriety.

Dorrigo was the youngest in a family of seven children. He soon lost touch with his brothers and sisters, every member of the family went on their path. He grew up in Tasmania, but later moved to the mainland, to Melbourne, where the six-foot tall Evans enters the university. Dorrigo shows no special abilities to medicine, but still graduates from the university. Since the beginning of the war he was a surgeon being moved to a military camp in Adelaide, where Evans goes through training. Evans marries, has a lover called Amy on the side and flies to Singapore to fight on the side of the Allies.

Evans in Singapore meets with other soldiers from his unit, and when Singapore surrenders to the Japanese army, the Australians are captured. Evans and his colleagues formes a special unit of prisoners, which includes only the Australians. His unit is sent to the construction work, namely for building of the Thai-Burma railway, which will run from Thailand to Burma.

In his novel Richard Flanagan is trying to lay on paper using artistic methods the story of Australians who were stationed at the Japanese POW camp. Perhaps the main problem of the novel is that it is too artistic. Flanagan has a lush style, he now and then inserts a quote from poetry, tends to bold descriptions and refuses to use quotation marks for dialogue. Such stylistic brightness, sometimes even with a touch of poetry, perfectly matches the life of the main character in the civilian world. Dorrigo Evans loves books and women more than anything else. Women like him, and he fascinates them. Evans is bursting with feelings. Despite his obvious sins (Evans does not even cheat on his wife, he acts as if he does not notice her, at least most of his life he did not notice her), Evans is a likeable hero. He is persistent, passionate, honest man of not too many words, and he is understood without words, by both men and women. He seems not to be blamed for his sins. He's like this by nature. Especially because in the novel his wife Ella is a pale shadow, not full-blooded person, and how we can sympathize with her that her husband is a womanizer?

The protagonist’s soul wanderings is the most intriguing part of the book. Whom he will choose and what happened to Evans after the war, these questions claws at us most of all. Colorful prose of Flanagan comes over already colorful with passion "civilian" part of the plot. But for the life in the camp are Flanagan’s colors are not so suitable. Too unnatural it looks, like a circus, not a camp for prisoners of war. Indeed, Flanagan doesn’t know a sense of proportion. Evans and his friends in the camp act like clowns, tirelessly repeat Britanisms «mate» and «rightio», Nakamura tells long tales about the wisdom of the emperor, as if sitting with friends and colleagues drinking tea, and in general it is not like a camp at all, but Chinese, or rather Japanese, circus. Flanagan goes over the top with paints: if everything is so colorful, it may be that all the prisoners do well in the camp? Maybe they were there on vacation and not with their bones the Road was built? The main hero has a horrible diarrhea, but the author depicts.

«He raised a crumbling canvas flap and Dorrigo Evans followed him through the flared nostril of the tent into a stench, redolent of anchovy paste and shit, so astringent it burnt in their mouths. The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved. At the far end of the shelter, a particularly wretched-looking skeleton sat up and smiled.»

A friend of the protagonist is drowning in a pit of waste and Flanagan again uses colorful prose. Thus, this style fails to convey the monotony, the horror and darkness of life in captivity.
In general, Flanagan’s book entertains more than makes us to think. Among the interesting thoughts there is one that the author touches upon in the chapters written from the point of view of the Japanese officers and guards. One of the guards says that it turned out like that: the Japanese, who had committed crimes against the Allies, white people, were sentenced to death and declared war criminals. But at the same time, the Japanese, who bullied and killed other Asians, weren’t even touched. It turns out that the racial-class division was under any conditions and at all times, whether it was war or peacetime.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North stirs the heart, but only at the beginning and at the end. The middle part on life on POW camp is a failure.

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See

Scribner, 2014

The structure of the novel is that the main events take place in August 1944 in France, and the background of major events begins in 1934. The author alternates between the two characters and the two countries, Germany and France.

In 1934, Marie-Laure, six-year-old girl, lives with her father in Paris. He works as a locksmith and in a museum in Paris. By the beginning of the novel the girl has completely lost her eyesight and now relies entirely on sound, smell and touch. Growing up at the museum, Marie-Laure knows almost all exhibits, guide’s stories, as well as the legend associated with the most valuable item in the museum - hidden in the vault the diamond size of an egg with, which, according to legend, has a curse. The father of the little girl masters castles and houses in miniature. On these models the girl learns to distinguish objects by touch, and later to walk unaided. Using a cane, Marie-Laure can safely move into a familiar space. The girl does not go to school (at that time, apparently, there was no school for children with disabilities), but her father every year gives her books for the blind. Marie-Laure learns to read and absorb with gusto "Around the World in 80 Days", " 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", and later a volume of Darwin.

In 1934 the second book hero Werner Pfennig was seven. He and his sister Jutta are orphans living in the child's home in the small German town. Werner since childhood manifested a talent for fixing mechanical objects, especially radios. Being eight-years-old he could with his eyes closed assemble and disassemble the radio. Gradually, word of his talent spread around, and the neighbors began to bring their receivers to Werner for repaire. With his sister in the evenings he listened to a French wave, where a man read fairy tales. Thanks to their teacher Frau Elena, the brother and sister learned French and could listen to the radio.

All the boys from the orphanage are expected to become miners, once they reach 15. But Werner shows his talent, receives a letter of recommendation from the local man, passes the entrance exams to elite school, where young talented men are trained for the Third Reich. Werner successfully passes the exams and goes to an elite school, promising to write to his sister. Jutta is worried about her brother, realizing the danger of the Nazis that came to power. But Werner does not care about the war, he just wants to go to university in Berlin and study Physics.

Anthony Doerr has written what seems to be quite realistic book, but it reads as something fantastic, something out of Jules Verne, whose books coincidentally the heroine of the novel reads. The story itself is full of adventures, mysterious artifacts, references to fairy tales, incredible coincidences and bright and pure love. War according to Doerr has nothing to do with the reality of war, this is romantic world, fantasy of sorts. But if the writer is a romantic, it does not make him worse than others. The war has given a premise to thousands of stories, and romantic ones have the same right to exist as a purely realistic.

Two heroes of Doerr’s book are on opposite sides, one potentially on the side of evil, the other on the side of good. It is hard, however, not to sympathize them both, if the author is equally fond of his characters. Werner is not guilty, that he was born in Germany and grew up without parents. It's not his fault that he was born with the talent and wanted to develop his talent. He just wanted to go to university, wanted to do things he loveв to do, wanted his sister to be proud of him. He was not a soldier (Marie-Laure later remember that Werner’s hands were even smaller than her hands), he was a young talented boy. “What the war did to dreamers” – Jutta’s words in the finale of the novel, meaming war killed people like him, are in many ways a reflection of the whole work.

Doerr runs slightly ahead with the chapters of August 1944, but the intrigue definitely is saved until the very end. The finale can break any heart made of stone, and even epilogue’s chapters does not seem superfluous.

This charming story is lightly smeared by stylistic flaws. Doerr uses abrupt, short sentences, especially in the beginning of the book, which are contrary to the atmosphere of the novel. These sentences express banalities devoid of individuality and often present only stylistic beauty. Once the author extends a sentence, the novel begins to move faster. Doerr has a vivid style and the use of obvious epithets only hurts the style.

All the Light We Cannot See is an undoubted success, and only the blind won’t see the author’s talent.

HHhH

Laurent Binet
HHhH

Vintage, 2013

Unnamed narrator of this novel - a writer, like Laurent Binet himself - aims to tell the story of the attempted assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942. A detailed account of not only attempt, but generally the events leading up to the assassination, Binet will tell in an unconventional manner, avoiding any kind of artistic assumptions, weaving into the novel facts in the encyclopedia style, talking about gathering information about Heydrich and sharing his impressions about other artistic works in film and literature describing Prague assassination attempt.

From the very beginning of the novel we know the names of two men from the Resistance Army, Joseph Gabčík and Jan Kubis, one Czech, one Slovak, who attempted to kill the Nazi leader. There is almost nothing that is known about them.

Plan to assassinate Heydrich is formed not immediately, and for several years the soldiers learned, trained, ready at any moment after the president in exile command (another president, loyal to Germany, was appointed after the entry of Germany into the territory of Czechoslovakia, also divided into two states).

The narrator knows much more about Heydrich. Frustrated musician, he served in the Navy, where he was expelled after the incident with a girl. Heydrich began dating the daughter of a Nazi, and she advised Heydrich to join the party. The Nazis couldn’t not take a capable military officer, which soon became the head of the secret service of the Gestapo, whose function was to collect information about everything and everyone. Heydrich gets thousands files which includes the smallest facts. For spying on high rank party members, he sets up a public house, equipped with microphones. Heydrich becomes close to Hitler's entourage, removing people unwanted by Fuhrer.

Binet early in the novel says that he would like to avoid fiction, sticking to the facts. In this statement there is as much as wickedness, as courage. Writer’s imagination still remains there, otherwise Binet would write a study, non-fiction, which is likely to have been written by a fair amount of writers before, but not a novel. Writer as storyteller is still here, but it’s his functions that changed.

Instead of fictional dialogues the author interweaves in the book his girlfriends (maybe they’re fictional); Binet does not skimp on historical anecdotes (including one about football); plays with the form by inserting into the novel fragments of newspaper articles. The author can not withdraw from the novel, the author is a novel, or vice versa.

Adhering to the historical truth and not wanting to come up and even think out, Binet still has to play by the laws of the novel. If even a fictional character's name is unacceptable for Binet, what to speak of intrigue or composition. But intrigue and composition are not missing in HHhH. For example, in the beginning of the book the narrator mentions “a Sten submachine gun”, pointing out at its unreliability. The narrator asks to remember this moment, and that intrigues the reader. And in fact, in the most dramatic scene of the book a Sten will play a key role. And the author\storyteller who it seens should to be cool, once he so adheres to the accuracy, can not restrain himself, cursing at the gun. This emotional breakdown of the author (such breakdowns are not one and not two there) evokes emotion in the reader, too.

As a work of fiction, HHhH is a fascinating read, rich with facts, devotional to historical accuracy. Based on a true story the plot makes you flipping through the pages.

But we must be aware that most of the book is devoted to not Czechoslovak heroes, but to the Nazi leader. There is a shift in emphasis, from the protagonists to the villain, but it is a history bobble, not author’s: there is a lot more information about Heydrich than about Gabčík, Kubis and others.

One must also keep in mind that this novel is full of antics, half-anecdotes, and some author’s attempts to be clever on the background of extremely serious topics such as the Holocaust. And when one page describes how a concentration camp is set up and a practice of killing of thousands of people, and on the other the author almost is picking his nose – let’s say, not everyone may like it. And someone may even call the author vulgar.

Translation from French here is on the brilliant level, among my complaints only a couple of Britanisms and a name Natasha, which in the novel mutilated into Natacha.

HHhH is a bold and experimental novel, well worth reading.

The Wind is not a River

Brian Payton
The Wind is not a River

Mantle, 2014

Journalist John Easley with a team of six people crashes in the Aleutian Islands near Alaska. Easley on a parachute lands on one of the islands, becoming the only survivor from the team. After recovering from the fall, Easley helps to get out of the water to another survivor, an aviator with another vessel.

They do not know whether this island inhabited or not, but in case of the Japanese soldiers stationed here, Easley and an aviator find shelter in a small cave, make a fire and dry aviator’s clothes. Aviator, twenty year old guy from Texas named Karl is younger than Easley for fifteen years, and despite his rank, he is less experienced in surviving in the cold and lack of food.

Karl says to Easley that he should not even been on a plane, and that is so. Easley’s younger brother, Warren, died in the English Channel. Brother's death spurred Easley to cover the war. Writer and journalist, known for articles about nature, Easley wants to illuminate obscure corners where the war is on, too. In 1942, the Japanese occupied two islands that are part of the Aleutians, and American troops in turn occupied the rest. This is the only section of the front where the war is going on in the United States territory as the Aleutians is a part of Alaska. All reports are prohibited from there, the information is encrypted carefully, and all the journalists were forcibly deported from there. Among them was Easley, at the time working with local people, Aleuts, many of whom are Russian descendants. Easley nevertheless did not want to leave alone his story of the Aleutian Islands and planned to return there illegally. He forged the documents, taking the name of his brother, used his brother’s uniform. Returning to the island turned out not quite so, as Easley imagined it.

The novel is based on factual material but that does not make it less artistic. Occupation of two islands belonging to the United States during World War II slipped between the pages of history books. But Payton is not limited to the expansion of our horizons. Selected historical period and place of action are the best backdrop for an exciting story. Payton doesn’t expose, a newspaper article would be enough for that, and but makes what, in general, an writer should do - showing something secret, such that we can not see in real life.

From the first page the book captures us, throwing the protagonist in the thick of things. Eventness gradually reduces, or rather the external eventness reduces but internal one rises. Gradually, the author talks about the history and inhabitants of the Aleutians, expands the main character’s past, stopping on his relationship with his brother and wife. And while the younger brother was cuter, funnier, more active than the older brother that was annoying to Easley, Easley all his life experienced some guilt to his brother, from the childhood, when he almost lost his brother at the station.

Leaving the protagonist almost on an almost uninhabited island, Payton could thus commit suicide. A lone hero in inaction could not pull the novel, lost in the monotonous depression or drowned in the past. However, Payton finds expressive means for loneliness. There are enough of hallucinations and survival skills to kill two birds with one stone - metaphysics and the law of the jungle, here should be called the law of wasteland.

Leaving his journalist protagonist, the author uses the metaphor of silence. The task of a journalist is to cover the events, tell the truth, and the protagonist wanted that coverage. But on the occupied island Easley has no one to tell, on the contrary, he should be silent, not to betray his presence to the enemies.

The storyline about Easley’s wife, Helen, could become a burden to the main plotline, if it were not that much interesting. All attempts to find a husband can be compared to what at the time Easley himself experienced. Civilian life is easy - the novel dispels this myth. Live in ignorance is physically difficult, not less difficult to search for your love ones. Helen also survives, but in a different environment and with other methods. When she gets in the entertainment group, she still struggles because she grew up without a mother. She didn’t know a maternal warmth, grew up without women's advices, even about her periods she learned from an elderly doctor.

Brian Payton excelled at all levels: he knows the history, knows how to build a story, elegantly switches between the main characters, has style, has an eye for detail.