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Bookshop ­ Love in a Cold Climate New Statesman ­ Bookshop ­ Love in a cold climate http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/200610020051 Regulars 6 NS CONTENTS Search our archive BOOK REVIEWS A History of the English­Speaking Peoples Since 1900 Bookshop Eating: what we eat Are you sad to see and why it matters House of Meetings Tony Blair go? Buy now and God Won't Save Martin Amis Jonathan Cape, 198pp, find out what Yes nmlkj 16.2% America: psychosis of £15.99 a nation you could save! ISBN 0224076094 No nmlkj 83.7% The Importance of Reviewed by Stephanie Merritt Being Eton Monday 2nd October 2006 Cast vote: House of Meetings To read comments The Emperor's In his non­fiction study of Stalin's Russia, Koba the Dread on the vote Children (2002), Martin Amis asked about life in the Gulag: "What made click here White Man Falling the difference between succumbing and surviving?" His answer ­ "In a place dedicated to death, what you needed in yourself was Don't Try This At force of life" ­ could be the tag­line for a redemptive Holocaust Home: culinary movie, but did little to offer a clear definition of this "force". catastrophes House of Meetings, Amis's tenth novel, gives it a human face Eats, Shoots and and a dark moral complexity: in the camps, "force of life" might Leaves mean a readiness to embrace violence in order to survive. The Jane Austen's Guide book also asks a further question: what will have been done to to Good Manners the humanity of those who survive? One caste in the camps, the urkas, tattoo their mantra on their bodies: "You may live, but BOOK ARTICLES you won't love." Television: An Eyre of intelligence Yet House of Meetings is "a story about love". It takes the form Observations: Victim of a confessional memoir sent by an anonymous Russian of the media narrator, now in his "high eighties", to his African­American step­daughter, Venus. He is journeying towards assisted suicide A wicked way with words after a final cruise to Norlag, the labour camp where he and his half­brother, Lev, were interned for almost a decade from the The NS guide to: mid­1940s ­ "The Gulag tour, so the purser tells me, never quite Stuff I've been caught on". As he updates his memoir from points around the reading archipelago, he watches the school siege of Beslan unfold on The poet of the hotel televisions and muses on the endogenous brutality of the provinces Russian character. Lost in the city He and Lev were students and therefore belonged to a category of prisoners known as "politicals" or "fascists"; though both were arrested by quota, the pretext was their association with Zoya, a Jewish student whose beauty bewitches both brothers. The narrator ­ tall, handsome and a decorated war hero ­ pursues Editor's note and her without success; Lev ­ hunched, ugly and afflicted with a this week's content stammer ­ marries her. Both find their will to survive in the camp ­ that elusive "force of life" ­ nourished by the idea of her. NS Library Searchable archive Zoya herself is only truly present in her in flu­ ence over the PDF edition relationship between the brothers. She is woman reduced to pure Supplements sexual allure to the point of becoming cartoonish, a sort of Free special Russian­Jewish Jessica Rabbit (the brothers' nickname for her is supplements "The Americas"). At the camp, Zoya remains a fantasy for the Blogs brothers, one that strengthens their bond, until the introduction of the eponymous House of Meetings, a meagre hut intended for Subscription Offer conjugal visits, where the narrator is confronted with the reality 1 of 3 10/3/2006 9:37 AM New Statesman ­ Bookshop ­ Love in a cold climate http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/200610020051 Subscription of his brother's marriage and his own failure. Search Amazon: Services It is in the depiction of daily life at the camp ­ the internecine Reader Offer struggles, the shifting alliances and compromises, the casual Wine Club abandonment of humanity merely to stay alive ­ that the novel really gains in sinew and the power to move. But on reaching the Edge Upstarts list of acknowledgements, a curious thought occurs: we already Policy Forum on have Gulag memoirs, and Amis credits several of them. After the Health eyewitness accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Janusz New Media Awards Bardach (who has a cameo role in this novel), what can a British novelist whose childhood barely overlaps with these events hope All in Good Taste Improving the to add to the genre? It may be a means of viewing Stalin's nation’s health regime in the context of modern terror, but it is also hard to escape the sense that this is a self­imposed challenge. Perhaps it Mobile/PDA Edition is the same kind of hubris that prompts a writer, amid the flurry Newsagents of 9/11 narratives, to create a story in which he puts himself Can't find a copy of inside the mind of Mohammed Atta. the NS? "I am not a character in a novel," states the narrator at the The Little Book of RSS Feeds Wisdom beginning of House of Meetings, pace Conrad. "Like many Dalai Lama XIV millions of others, I and my brother are characters in a work of Bstan­'dzin­rgya­mtsh... social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities." REGULARS New £2.00! Yet, although the substance of his story is borrowed from those Neighbours from memoirists who had the misfortune not to be fictional, he is a hell character in a novel, and he is fortunate to have Amis's Village life inimitable humour and effortlessly brilliant sentences at his Read this week's NS disposal. Media cover to cover for just £1 The human rights For admirers who feared, after his last novel, Yellow Dog, that click here page Amis's non­fiction endeavours had leached the force of life from This England his fiction, House of Meetings should be a reassurance; taken FREE to all NS alone, it is a compelling work of fiction in which learning and subscribers! Competition imagination are beautifully counterpoised. Placed alongside From our archive Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, however, Rory's week it can't help but look like an audacious fake. For the latest Politics Stephanie Merritt is the author of "Real" (Faber & Faber) current and cultural affairs, delivered to COLUMNS your inbox every Hester Lacey Thursday, enter Buy this book now and find out what you could save! your email address Lindsey Hilsum below: Rageh Omaar Ziauddin Sardar This review first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print Subscribe: ARTS & CULTURE edition. Arts diary Unsubscribe: Theatre Film Television Radio Travels Sport Reboot Dress code 2 of 3 10/3/2006 9:37 AM New Statesman ­ Bookshop ­ Love in a cold climate http://www.newstatesman.com/Bookshop/200610020051 © New Statesman 1913 ­ 2006 ­ Terms & Conditions ­ Privacy Policy ­ About New Statesman ­ Contact us ­ Subscription Services ­ Can't find a copy? NS jobs & internships ­ Advertising ­ RSS feeds ­ Syndication 3 of 3 10/3/2006 9:37 AM .
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