May Day come early:
“House of Meetings” is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.
That was Kakutani, who purged Mart for his eccentric and misguided Koba the Dread. Joan Acocella also digs the new novel:
Though Amis, in his previous novels, has been something of a meta-fictioneer, the shining virtue of “House of Meetings” is its old-fashioned psychological realism. Amis, like Primo Levi, his great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization, is able to calculate degrees of anguish. Lev can stand the infestation of lice—“I reach into my shirt,” he says, “and if they’re only little ones I think fuck it and put them back”—but eventually he cannot bear his dirtiness, the fact that his clothes are stiff, barklike, from his body’s excrescences. This makes him weep. On the other hand, when, in the camp, his soul receives the blow from which it will never recover, he does not cry. His eyes, the narrator says, were “swiveled inward, where they were doing the work of decrease.” The work of decrease—how modest this is, how final. Throughout the book we get such nuances: the counter-currents, the backflow, of suffering.