Mark Helprin has written yet another captivating, gut-wrenching novel called The Oceans and the Stars. He is one of my favorite authors, probably because his prose is poetic, lyrical, yet powerful. His descriptive powers engender remarkable images of people and places in the imagination and provokes a visceral reaction to every scene whether tender or violent.
The Oceans and the Stars is about a naval captain who gets sideways with the President and is punished by being denied promotion and placed in command of a vessel below his rank and experience. The ship he’s assigned to, the Athena is a littoral cruiser that is one of a kind because the administration and the navy decided that close to shore combat was inferior to long distance warfare.
Dispatched to the Indian Ocean on essentially a suicide mission, Captain Rensselaer and his crew have to fight external and internal enemies. It is a story of honor, loyalty, and love. It explores the concept of just cause, ‘casus belli’ and the willingness to sacrifice one’s future and one’s life in that cause. And it is a hell of a good war story and love story to boot.
I am also reading, slowly, an Italian mystery, which Italians call ‘gialli’ or yellows, entitled L’uomo del Porto. It is one book in the series about an Italian police investigator named Vanina Guarrasi. It is also a television series. Like the Makari series, I have two purposes for reading them; okay, maybe three. First, to improve my Italian language skills; second, to see how close the tv series comes to the novels; and third, for pleasure. I have not seen an episode based on this book, so I can’t really comment on how true to the story the series is, but most of the characters seem aligned.
Finally, and maybe I should mean that in the sense of ‘at last’ I’m reading Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman. I’m only 286 pages in, but already it looks to be an indispensable addition to my library that I will read more than once (it’s only 871 pages after all). Structured somewhat like War and Peace, the novel is broken into parts that tell the stories of different characters during World War II (or World War Eleven to some) and more specifically the siege of Stalingrad. Born in 1905, the son of Ukrainian Jews, Grossman was an award-winning combat journalist during that time. But he had also lived through the Stalinist purges and the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ of the 1930s and became disillusioned with communism. Somewhat slowly at first he builds ultimately on the analogous natures of Communism and Nazism, which is certainly not a stretch since NAZI is the acronym for National Socialist Workers Party. As Orwell did in 1984 he describes the tools of tyranny inherent in the two systems, one of which is the rewriting of history. “No one talked like this before the war. The might of the State had constructed a new past. It had made the Red Cavalry charge a second time. It had dismissed the genuine heroes of long-past events and appointed new ones. The state had the power to replay events, to transform figures of granite and bronze, to alter speeches long since delivered, to change the faces in a news photograph. A new history had been written. Even people who had lived through those years had now to relive them, transformed from men to cowards, from revolutionaries to foreign agents.” The other tool of tyranny he shines light on is the precedence of the State over the individual. “ ‘No,’ said Madyarov, ‘there are two distinct principles. Stalin does not build what the people need—he builds what the State needs…The needs of the State are one pole; the people’s needs are the other pole. These two poles are irreconcilable.’” These two examples are eerie warnings of what many seeking and holding power today will do if given enough of it.
That, however, is not the main theme of the novel so far. It is more the exploration of human nature in crisis. The sacrifices and privation his real mother endured—she was murdered along with thousands of other Jews by the Nazis—are reflected in the letter from a mother to her son on the eve of her death at German hands, as are those of citizens in the U.S.S.R’s murderous system of gulags, show trials, mass starvation, forced collectivization and a host of other horrors perpetrated upon them. During the reign of Nikita Kruschev, Grossman’s book was ‘arrested’ though he himself was not. Seen as dangerous to the Soviet Union they confiscated and destroyed the known copies of the novel, the carbon copies, and even the typewriter ribbons on which it was written. Fortunately, he had the sense to give two copies to close friends and never told anyone about them, and Life and Fate finally got published in 1980.
I have always admired Russian writers tremendously. Dostoyevsky might just be my favorite writer of all time. Whether it is him, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Gogol, Chekhov, or Solzhenitsyn their ability to tap into the human soul, the psychology of man is other-worldly to me. Yet, I despise Russia’s entire bleak history. And I think Grossman sums up my feeling in this passage: “Shargorodsky was a very gentle man and quite helpless in any practical matter. He was the sort of man about whom people say, ‘He’s got the soul of a child,’ or ‘He’s as kind as an angel.’ And yet he could walk straight past a hungry child or a ragged old woman begging for crusts, feeling quite indifferent, still muttering his favourite lines of poetry.” The nation never lives up to their poets’ sense of value or compassion for the individual. Later in the novel Grossman elucidates this idea himself when one of his characters says, “Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom. Of the dignity of the Russian man. Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian. From Avvakum to Lenin our conception of humanity and freedom has always been partisan and fanatical.”
Quite a statement. Well, I’ll write more, perhaps, when I’ve finished, but that’s it for now.
