Love in the times of Gulag

- by India Writes Network | India Writes Network

The House of Meetings

Author: Martin Amis

Martin Amis’s novella is an audacious attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history with all its hidden squalor and unspoken
dread through the triangular love story of two half-brothers and the Jewish woman they love. A “love story, gothic in timbre and triangular
in shape,” Amis’ 11th novel revisits Stalin’s labour camps and dramatises the nature of masculinity, power, violence and loveless
sex.
The ‘House of Meetings’ of the title refers to the hut in the gulag where the enemies of the people, consigned by the Soviet authorities
to these camps, were permitted occasional conjugal visits. Valiant women would travel huge distances, says the jacket sleeve, sometimes
for weeks or even months, in the hope of spending a night in the House of Meetings.

The story begins in the famine winter of 1946 in a gulag camp and turns on the life-long obsession of the two half-brothers, the one a
soldier and rapist, the other a worker and poet, with Zoya – the Jewish bohemian nicknamed by them, with that typical Amis’ flair for
satire, “The Americas.” “Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook.
When she sneezed -you felt that absolutely anything might happen,” the author writes.

Zoya is married to the younger brother. Her arrival, on July 31, 1956, at the House of Meetings and the first night they spend together as
man and wife sets in motion a complex interplay of emotions that shadows the novel that grapples with far more serious themes of rust,
ruin and decay. The love story, with all its piquant ironies, expertly blends with a dark meditation on the character and complexion of
contemporary Russia, evoked as “a slum family” in which “all the money has been divided up between the felons and the state.”

A grim retrospect on the ‘ravaged century’, the House of Meetings is also about jealousy, desire, morals, anarchy, resistance, aggression,
solipsism and confession. The book continuously asks the readers to question who is responsible for the act of brutality in the book;
whether it is an individual, or the state or if it is the unfolding of the history as a nightmare we have not yet woken from.

The Road to Nowherethe road

The Road

Author:Cormac Mc Carthy

Mc Carthy’s new masterpiece is a road trip, albeit a scary and nightmarish one, by a father and his young son as they trudge from the
mountains to the coast in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes and ruins. It’s an unremittingly bleak landscape evoked in stripped-down prose so
characteristic of the author’s style in which darkness and grotesqueness are the norm, a world peopled by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who look
like “shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

In this excruciatingly lonely journey, all the father and the son, “the good guys,” have is their unconditional love for each other.
Cold, hunger and despair are present every inch of their journey to test their faith and the sheer will to live and love each other.

The evocation of the barren landscape stalked by starving cannibals turns out to be a succession of prose poems and imbue the novel with
biblical resonance. “The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a
lamp,” the author writes.
In this unforgiving desolate world “the frailty of everything” is revealed at last and “old and troubling issues resolved into
nothingness and night.”

The only thing that sustains the father is a transcendental faith to keep his son alive and hopeful that outshines implacable darkness and “the crushing black vacuum of the universe” they have been plunged into. “My job is to take care of you,” he tells his son. “I was
appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.”
When his son asks, in moments of genuine confusion, “Are we still the good guys?,” the good father replies: “This is what good guys do. They
keep trying. They don’t give up.”

In the end, McCarthy’s characters are alone and lost in scenery devoid of colour, painted in whites, blacks and grey, devastated by a nuclear
war and now hounded by violent cannibals.

McCarthy’s eloquent use of Biblical myths, invoking Hemingway’s vision and Faulkner’s prose, classical allusions, brings to mind Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot. Godot’s endless waiting is replaced by an endless walking. There is no hope of being rescued and there is an
acknowledgment of a death awaiting them. Surviving amidst the physical and moral annihilation, the boy and the man are each other’s desperate
prayer in this holocaust, existing solely on tenderness and love.

Despite the lack of a historical context, the novel underscores the ephemeral nature of our existence and survival and takes us down the
road where we would rather not go and forces us to think about questions we don’t want to ask. Publishers Weekly calls it the
“closest thing in American Literature to an Old Testament prophet…” A page-turner despite the harrowing reality and grim vision it presents.

Author Profile

India Writes Network
India Writes Network
India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) is an emerging think tank and a media-publishing company focused on international affairs & the India Story. Centre for Global India Insights is the research arm of India Writes Network. To subscribe to India and the World, write to editor@indiawrites.org. A venture of TGII Media Private Limited, a leading media, publishing and consultancy company, IWN has carved a niche for balanced and exhaustive reporting and analysis of international affairs. Eminent personalities, politicians, diplomats, authors, strategy gurus and news-makers have contributed to India Writes Network, as also “India and the World,” a magazine focused on global affairs.

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