by Ed Simon
Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.
I’m a sucker for a certain type of European novel, or if not actually European, something that trades in all of those connotations of that continent, of that word. Specifically central European and eastern European settings, perhaps because of some deep ancestral affinity for that borderland between the occident and orient, a place of beets, carraway seeds, and sour-cream, of gnarled primeval forests and grey rivers, of craggy ominous mountains or lonely sunflower covered steppes, massive brutalist apartment blocks and picturesque little Medieval hamlets of onion domed churches and red-tiled roofed homes. For that reason, this past year I’ve continually drifted towards either novels from folks originally from the Balkans, Poland, Russia, or I’ve read American imaginings of that broad inchoate land bordered by the Adriatic and the Bosphorus, the Black Sea and the Baltic, along the banks of the Danube or the Volga.
Daniel Mason’s 2018 The Winter Soldier was a particular type of eastern European story, an epic war account from the perspective of introverted Austro-Hungarian medical student Lucius, a scion of Viennese society from noble Polish stock who is unfortunately sent as a medic to the homeland of his forefathers on the eve of the Brusilov Offensive. My introduction to Mason was this past summer, when I read Northwoods, his brilliant, polyvocal, magical realist, slightly gothic, maximalist account of American history from the colonial era through to the near future all as focalized through a single western Massachusetts house in the woods, a character its own right. The Winter Soldier, in an envious display of Mason’s tremendous talent, is a profoundly different book.
Effectively a realist novel in the vein of a Boris Pasternak more than the Thomas Pynchon on display in Northwoods, Mason’s earlier attempt is a novel of the Great War, with accounts of charging Cossacks and rationing in Vienna, of railroad stations filled with fleeing refugees and of cruel Hussar officers. There is, of course, a love story (and a mystery) as well, Lucius inevitably falling for the nun who works alongside him as a nurse, but it is heartbreakingly depicted, with sentimentality but no schmaltz. Beyond that, however, Mason has written an indelibly effecting account of medicine, as Lucius is forced to develop from a shaky student in the distant cosmopolitan capital into a frontline emergency physician treating soldiers whose minds and bodies have been blown apart.
Tortured by the series of well-meaning decisions that he made in trying to cure a shell-shocked Hungarian later brutally punished by the officers, Lucius learns that “he had committed one of the great sins of medicine, choosing to work a miracle over the mundane duty not to harm.” Much of The Winter Soldier is dedicated to lyrical but exacting descriptions of setting bones, suturing wounds, lancing pustules, treating sepsis. Mason, who still works as a psychiatrist, obviously brings his own experience as a medical student into his vividly rendered scenes of physical trauma. That he is an immaculate prose stylist means that the result is a novel of medicine – both the training in and practice of it – that few other writers would be able to do with as much painful, but beautiful, accuracy.
My jaunt through the backwaters of European history continued with Aleksander Hemon’s two-novels-in-one with The Lazarus Project, a vaguely metafictional roman a clef. Familiar with Hemon’s incredible essays, particularly the autobiographical The Books of My Lives, means that it’s been a continuing pleasure to discover the fiction in which he’d originally earned his reputation. Born in Yugoslavia, the Bosnian of Ukrainian descent was in Chicago just as the first of the genocidal Balkan wars erupted in 1991. The trauma of dislocation, and of survivor’s guilt, is a mainstay of both his essays and his stories, with the 2008 The Lazarus Project following another Windy City-based Bosnian writer of Ukrainian descent named Vladimir Brik beginning a research project based on the real-life Ukrainian-Jewish anarchist Lazarus Averbuch, murdered by the Chicago chief-of-police in 1908. The novel’s chapters alternate between Brik’s present-day of 2008 and the aftermath of Averbuch’s death a century earlier, a meditation on the refugee’s continual predicament of dislocation and exile.
I’ve always found something satisfying about these sorts of braided narratives, where you’re introduced to a set of characters that you’re invested in, but you can trade them out before their presence over stays its welcome. It works well in The Lazarus Project, as Hemon deftly differentiates the two time periods, and provides tremendous local detail in the accounts of Brik and a child-hood friend – a surly Bosniak who works as a photographer – making their way through the various European locales once familiar to Averbuch in his childhood and to them in theirs. “Home is where somebody realizes that you’re no longer there” writes Hemon, an endlessly quotable master of the English language (which he only learned in adulthood), a prose stylist whose mature adaptation of our guttural tongue from the cold shoals of northwestern Europe has rightly earned him comparison to Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov. At its core, The Lazarus Project is a melancholic rumination on that quote, and what it means when you no longer have a home at all, whether in Lviv, Sarajevo, or Chicago. As an immigrant novel, maybe a dual immigrant novel, Hemon’s picaresque is less about the convulsions of eastern Europe than it’s about the failure of an American dream, where every cop’s pistol can still be as threatening as a Cossack’s bayonet and pogroms aren’t always just a vestige of the Old World.
Sister Europe, the latest from Nell Zink who wrote the amazing Doxology, is to be released on March 25th, promising a contemporary comedy of errors as an assemblage of motley high-society guests traipse through Berlin in search of a Burger King after a sparsely attended award ceremony in Arabic literature whose prize money was supplied by a Middle Eastern princess. In tow are Demian, a German art critic, his adolescent trans daughter Nicole, his longtime friend Helen, his best friend the American publisher Toto (nickname from the band), Toto’s internet date whose nickname is the Flake (for obvious reasons), and the elderly (and absent) princess’ polymorphously sexual Prince Radi, with all of them trailed by a dim-witted, right-wing vice cop who thinks that Nicole is a hooker and Toto a john. Structured around a unity of time and place, Sister Europe is an admirable character study, even more so of bifurcated Berlin, the Cold War’s frontline where east and west uneasily sat, and in someways sit uneasily still.
The metropolis where the “Cold War was larger than life, always threatening to destroy humankind and plunge the planet into nuclear winter,” and yet where the bohemian ethos of the underground paradoxically supplied “an indescribable sensation of freedom.” The end result in Sister Europe, though it’s an enjoyable read, doesn’t always entirely hang together. Character motivations can be hard to parse or seem unrealistic (or I’m bad at understanding Germans, equally possible). The pay-off is disappointing, and the promised realizations about Sister Europe expressing something of the continent at this particular moment don’t entirely come. Despite that, Zink is exemplary in dialogue, and the narrative itself can’t help but move quickly – and it’s brief.
Darrow Farr’s freshman novel The Bombshell, to be released on May 27th, trades the grim and grey high rises of eastern Europe or the history-haunted corridors of Berlin for the sun-kissed beaches of Mediterranean Corsica, though politics itself is still as present. Severine Guimard, the 17-year-old daughter of a French prefect in colonial Corsica and his American heiress-cum-poet bride is the titular bombshell of the title, a bored and precocious high school student kidnapped by a trio of amateurish freedom fighters. Over the course of the summer of 1993, Severine – whether because of Stockholm Syndrome or a genuine adoption of their cause – becomes the face of their cell as she trades her dreams of Hollywood stardom for radical chic. Clearly drawing from the earlier real-life case of Patty Hearst, Severine – under a heavy diet of Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx supplied by the cell-leader Bruno – becomes a symbol of colonial resistance as the stakes and the violence of their terrorist activities increases.
I couldn’t help but read The Bombshell in comparison to Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, the literary darling of last summer, in part because of their shared Gallic locale. Both novels are political, to a degree at least, and interested in ideas, though Kushner’s is admittedly the headier of the two. Even still, Severine’s contention that this “movement isn’t about me, or even just Corsica. It’s about everyone who has been screwed over by the ruling class” can’t help but hit the zeitgeist well in the current Age of Luigi. More than any of those similarities, both novels remind me of works from an earlier time, from their accounts of European leftist terror cells debating critical theory while hiding in the French countryside to even the covers of the novels whose design evokes the sort of smarter paperback titles that proliferated in the 70s. Farr’s creation of Severine is in some ways more effective than that of Kushner’s Sadie Smith, even while the conclusion of The Bombshell, in an odd postscript that takes up nearly a fifth of the book, was ultimately less satisfying to me than Creation Lake’s ending. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how the discourse approaches The Bombshell after its release, the narrative of an adolescent girl kidnapped and falling in love with her captor, the power dynamics of which are only really glancingly addressed, being problematic to say the least.
Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family ostensibly isn’t about Europe at all, rather taking place in upstate New York in that most American of genres, the campus novel. Yet Europe, and the convulsions, traumas, and horrors delivered on it and by it, are at the core of The Netanyahus. Bronx-born history professor Rubin Blum is the only Jew on the faculty at rural Corbin College in 1960, which is the obvious reason why he’s asked to shepherd the potential faculty hire Israeli academic Benzion Netanyahu (of yes, those Netanyahus) through campus. Blum, who in someways clearly recalls the titan of literary criticism Harold Bloom and in someways is entirely Cohen’s creation, is an engaging narrator, an homage to the great mid-century Jewish-American characters from Alex Portnoy to Auggie March, while also sending up some of the conventions of those works.
“The history of my regular schooling was all about progress,” mulls the arch-assimilationist Blum, “a world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” Hanging over The Netanyahus is the Holocaust of fifteen short years before, as well as the casual antisemitism that marks American Protestant culture, but the solutions offered by the arch Zionist Netanyahu hardly seem more coherent than Blum’s. Another novel of ideas, for which Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, The Netanyahus is also, in the tradition of Roth and Bellow, hilarious. A fierce and biting incendiary novel, the titular family are depicted in a less than flattering light (to put that gently), while Blum is an academic everyman, implicated in world events where his historical scholarship is unable to make any difference. A parable of the European situation, and the American too, where knowing history doesn’t mean we’re no longer condemned to repeat it, only that we’ve got the apprehensions of knowing what’s coming.
***
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily and LitHub, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker in 2024.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.