spoken for

This book was recommended to me by… someone, or something, I don’t remember, and it made its way to my Amazon.com wishlist. I bought it last week without much thought, it arrived yesterday, and I finished it this morning. It’s quite short, really, only 145 pages with approximately 12pt font.

I think there are three words I could use to describe this book: sad, hollow, and cryptic.

On one hand, I felt that it was completely boring and devoid of all emotion, but on the other… I couldn’t put it down. In the third paragraph, you are greeted with the first occurrence of the “f-word.” It’s not that I can’t handle that of course, it was that it was totally unexpected and seemed to set the tone for the whole book. The story is told in first-person, but it’s a novel by a guy born in the 1960’s, so it’s not a true story nor is it told from the viewpoint of the author, just from the viewpoint of the main character who, to the readers, remains not only nameless but sexless (as in gender).

The main character/storyteller (from here on out referred to as S) has only two great loves in life: him/herself and language arts - the learning of language, poetry, other literature, etc. This is not so much a book about how a person was affected during WWII as much as it is a book about how one selfish person continued to live, almost as normal, during WWII until he/she “saved” a Jewish man from certain death and hid him in the cellar.

That’s supposed to be the main of the plot but it takes half of the short book to get to that point. Sometimes you might be a bit confused as S may in one second be talking about his/her WWII experiences, then the past, then the future (our present); sometimes thoughts seem to end in mid-sentence and S moves on to something else.

There are several forms of imprisonment covered in this book… concentration camps, of course (though S does not seem to ever be aware of the full reality of Nazi camps); Nazi oppression; a loveless, and literally sexless marriage; etc. However, it seems the only thing that really bothers S is the fact that some of his/her favorite authors have been banned by the Nazi’s and he/she must now retreat to a hidden corner of the cellar to read.

S “finds” this Jewish man and on impulse takes him away to the cellar where he lives for over two years. They share a love for literature and after a while get to know one another and finally become lovers. Of course, the author is still not clear about the sex of S. You almost go back and forth in your mine between man and woman and it’s the one thing that really annoys me about the book, that I never find out if he’s a he or she’s a she. However, though S finally says that he/she loves this man, Herman, I still get the feeling it’s all about S, not about anyone else. Selfishness reigns.

Something happens that I won’t reveal and Herman becomes unhappy and restless and… well, I won’t reveal that here, read it. Seriously, someone else read this book and tell me what you think, because I really can’t decide fully what I think.

I don’t guess this is what I would call a good book. It really got me thinking about various things but that was about it. It’s too short to really get into, it’s over before it starts and the level of detail is a bit too mysterious for me. I also did not like the feeling of anti-Semitic undertones I was picking up, especially towards the second half of the book.

Anyone else read this?