BOTH REVIEWS BY T. FRED WELLS
DEAD SOULS by Nikolai Gogol is the sharpest satirical work
of the 19th C. and among the best examples of the genre in all of
literature. Satire at its best takes a repulsive and yet acceptable social
condition to its extreme but logical conclusion to show the grotesquery of the
society that allows it to persist. The
satirical watershed in English language is Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest
Proposal” in which the author recommends that Irish babies be slaughtered and
processed into food in order to solve two problems—over-population and
starvation—at once. More subtle but just
as biting is Gogol’s depiction of the social climbing Chichikov’s plan to buy
up the property rights to dead Russian peasants. At the time Gogol wrote DEAD SOULS in the
1840s, Russian peasants were still the legally owned property of Russian
landowners. Like any owned asset, they
could be bought, sold and even mortgaged, and they were subject to property
tax. The DEAD SOULS refer to those peasants who have met their maker but remain
on the tax roles until the next census, a period as long as seven years. Chichikov hits on the brilliant idea of having
the current owners transfer ownership of the DEAD SOULS to himself. As Swift does in his “modest proposal,” Chichikov
addresses two problems at once: he relieves the current owner of the tax
burden; and he becomes a man of property who can then mortgage his owned peasants,
so long as the lender does not inspect the property. The result is a cynicism rare in Western
literature until the birth of Modernism following the First World War, as
societal outrage is directed, not at the concept of owning human beings, but at
a man of ample charm, average brain and little drive trying to improve his
station by exploiting an evil and yet venerable institution.
The inescapable problem of DEAD SOULS is that it is an
ingenious allegory and laugh-out-loud societal skewering in search of a
cohesive story. There is a shambling
beginning, a rambling middle and a missing end.
Gogol wrote the first half of the novel when he was a sharp, lean and
mean thirty-something. He then took a
ten-year break and returned to DEAD SOULS just as he was becoming paranoid
about the prospects for his own eternal soul, in no small part because of
having written DEAD SOULS. The result is
a second half that attempts to blunt the sharp satire of the first and winds up
pleasing no one, including apparently Gogol who burned several hundred pages of
manuscript while failing to finish the book.
Plot aside, the first half is masterful at depicting character
types we encounter too often in our workaday lives and themes that make us
thank God it’s Friday amid settings that shift between farmhouses, stately
homes and government offices. Chichikov
is alternately loved and loathed, trusted and suspected, revered and reviled in
Gogol’s examination, both surgical and blunt-force, of the different social
strata. And if there is any question
about the relevance of this book 170 years after it was written, the reader need
look no further than FIFA in 2015.
Chichikov is the Seth Blatter of his age, a man “suffering in public
service for the truth...swaddled in forbearance, myself being forbearance
itself.”
A classic. FIVE STARS
If DEAD SOULS has too little plot, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT
SEE may just have too much. I was more
than satisfied with eventually conjoining stories of the blind French girl
Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s survival during the years leading up to and including the
Second World War and of the German youth Werner Pfennig’s training and
deployment by the Army of the Third Reich.
The addition of the subplot about a world-famous diamond and the hunt for
it by the cancer-stricken Von Rumpel threatens to turn a "serious novel”
into a fanciful thriller. It certainly
helps to make the book a page-turner, but if that is the principal criterion
for excellence then BILLIARDS AT HALF-PAST NINE would not be the consensus JFDI
favourite.
Unlike the DEAD SOULS, the landscape of ALL THE LIGHT WE
CANNOT SEE is the world as it should be and not as it is. Even against the backdrop of a savage war
wrought by a brutal regime, the good guys are mostly stout-hearted and selfless
while the bad guys are consistently selfish and cruel. There is little if anything to admire or
forgive about Von Rumpel , the school commandant Hauptmann or the French
collaborator Levitte and little to disparage about Marie-Laure, her father, Werner,
Uncle Etienne, Madame Ruell and Volkheimer.
In the end, bad things do happen to good people, with the book reminding
us that it’s an existential world after all via plot turns—especially the
Russian rape of Children’s House—adding up to a gratuitous cop-out.
What stands out about ALL THE LIGHT YOU CANNOT SEE is the
meticulous research behind such disparate subjects as locks, radios, mineralogy,
Nazi boot camps and American birdlife, all of which make for a cornucopia of metaphor
that holds together the various subplots, time-shifts and characters. Even then, the accumulation of detail eventually
starts to feel like authorial sleight-of-hand meant to distract the reader with
the injection of technical authenticity from the fact that the storylines and
characters could never hope to exist in anything like a real world. I only wish Anthony Doerr had stayed
consistent and allowed that world to persist to the end.
A very good read but not a classic. FOUR STARS
