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House Of Meetings |
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A present-day narrator recounts a lengthy period spent in a Russian gulag following WWII in the latest book from the English novelist.
Knopf, 256 pages
01/16/2007
$23.00
ISBN: 1400044553
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Keir Graff
His prognosis for Russia is grim, but fans of the writer will be gratified by this remarkable return to form. [15 Nov 2006, p.6]
Kirkus Reviews
The most compelling fiction from Amis in more than a decade. [15 Nov 2006, p.1140]
The Spectator Simon Baker
There are echoes of "Lolita," a novel about a paedophile which delights intelligent, sensible readers, who, if the story were not fictional and joyously penned, would ordinarily be sickened. Here the crime is different, but the effect is similar. [30 Sept 2006]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran
Be it the Holocaust or nuclear weapons, totalitarianism or fundamentalism, the need to recognize and accept core truths about the postmodern condition -- his own "big zona," perhaps -- is what unifies his singular, extraordinary project.
PopMatters Connie Ogle
A consistently gripping, concise epic of human atrocity.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
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.
The Economist
Martin Amis has suddenly - and unexpectedly, even to his publishers - turned in a work of real worth, a novel that not so much makes the spine tingle as the heart race at its passion and richness...A singular, unimpeachable triumph.
The Observer Toby Lichtig
Amis's prose, though typically exuberant, is more measured than it has been for a while, less full of the shoe-horned jokes. Once we get over our narrator's suspiciously good English and the fact that his voice is essentially that of Amis, it is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force.
The Independent Catherine Merridale
It is so uncompromisingly bleak that only dedicated readers will stay with the tale, though in that darkness also lies its truth.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Bharat Tandon
The new surroundings may be uncomfortable, even forbidding, but as a result of this move, Martin Amis’s fiction has also successfully grown back up.
San Francisco Chronicle Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Koba the Dread ultimately amounted to less than the sum of its parts because its descriptions of such unrecognizability seemed too insistent and oddly self-promotional on Amis' part; "House of Meetings" is successful because it describes that deterioration from the inside.
The New Yorker Joan Acocella
Much of the book is wonderful...I find these traits of his annoying, but they are part of something larger, which I cherish: his sheer courage as a writer.
USA Today Bob Minzesheimer
It's a somber, powerful and challenging story about love and betrayal.
Library Journal Leslie Patterson
Although Amis writes as brilliantly as ever, squeamish readers may find the graphic scenes of life in the gulag difficult to get through. [1 Dec 2006, p.105]
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Impressive – and impressively disturbing.
Los Angeles Times James Marcus
Amis has called literature one long "war against cliché" — a war against slack language and calcified thoughts — and on a sentence-by-sentence basis, this stylistic warrior can hardly be bettered.
Entertainment Weekly Jeff Giles
The epistolary form feels like a musty, distracting convention for a novelist of Amis' power. What's worse, his famously stylish prose has vanished in favor of a solemn baritone.
Houston Chronicle Robert Cremins
My complaint about this novel is a rare one in these days of bloated tomes and tepid editing: It is a hundred pages too short.
The New York Times Book Review Liesl Schillinger
Fortified by an arsenal of new details, he has revisited his magnificent obsession with systematized inhumanity, coloring in areas of despair that previously had languished in murky outline, eye-catching to scholars but perhaps not clear enough to others.
Slate Keith Gessen
Amis now knows that he can write a book about the Gulag and still come out sounding pretty much the same, with the same inflections and the same concerns: breasts, erections (presence and lack of them), and writing. So, maybe that means those are the great concerns, and he's going to have to live with them.
The Guardian M John Harrison
Everything is presented with Amis's customary élan and intelligence. He will go the long way round to avoid a cliché, sometimes he will coagulate from trying too hard and sometimes he will be a pedant - all this is to be expected. But the result is often a prose packed, dense, full of felicities.
Washington Post Thomas Mallon
The book's title refers to a camp building in which Lev is permitted a conjugal visit with Zoya in 1956. What actually happens inside the House of Meetings, and its shattering effect upon the narrator's half-brother, become the chief psychological mystery and source of suspense in the novel, but the revelatory payoff may strike readers as somewhat vague and anticlimactic, dampened as it is by some of the same abstraction that the narrator finds so telltale in the national character.
London Review Of Books Daniel Soar
The old Amis can’t quite come out and name the moral fastidiousness that he feels the younger Amis suffers from, in "The Rachel Papers," in "London Fields."
Sydney Morning Herald Anthony Macris
The novel doesn't entirely work, and not because it isn't at times profound, or because its humour falters. Quite the contrary: it's full of pathos, and often very funny. It's just not funny in a way that quite gels with the horror of a Soviet forced labour camp.
Daily Telegraph Tibor Fischer
Amis has 200 pages to flesh out the narrator, but for most of the book he remains as substantial as a wet Kleenex. Every now and then there's a flicker of character and story, but this isn't a bona fide novel; it's a notebook charting Amis's current interests and musings with a few dollops of imagination tossed on top.
Village Voice Brendan Bernhard
There are some affecting, memorable moments, but too often Amis's almost sadistically polished prose feels glaringly inappropriate, like a virtuoso pianist preening before an audience of starving prisoners.
New York Observer Adam Begley
If Mr. Amis’ principal aim is to make the slave archipelago and its human toll real to those of us, like Venus, who were born after the Gulag was dissolved—if his aim is to show us the atrocities of Soviet communism in action—then his novel is a failure, in part because of the repeated intrusion of the octogenarian lecturing his stepdaughter, but mostly because the love triangle that’s meant to give dramatic impetus to the story is neither credible nor compelling. [15 Jan 2007, p.1]
Boston Globe Saul Austerlitz
Amis does his utmost to reanimate Solzhenitsyn, occasionally capturing his essence , but the tone of weary, ironic remove is simply inimitable. Amis has never lost his remarkable gift for description, or his crisp command of dialogue, but the enormity of the camps overwhelms even him.
Publishers Weekly
Amis's trademark riffs are all too muffled in his obvious research. [6 Nov 2006, p.36]
The Nation Daniel Swift
The weakness of House of Meetings, its strange mix of abstraction and literalism, is a double tragedy, for not only does Amis at times write better fiction than anyone else, he also writes better about fiction than most.
The Independent Tim Martin
There's something essentially unserious, something almost glib, about Amis's constant propensity for aphorism, about the glittering delight in words that overlays the text, about the relentless editorialising that each character is now compelled to undergo. You can almost see Martin, stooped over his laptop, becalmed, trying to think of another smart epithet for another horrible thing. And the result, more often than not, comes to read like a wicked parody of the Amis style.
The average user rating for this book is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Mass Hysteria gave it a6:
Amis must have anticipated some of the criticism listed above because he's careful to have the narrator acknowledge that he needs some distance from the events described in the book. The anachronistic American lingo and the postmodern "throat-clearing," (to quote the review by Tibor Fischer), therefore, can be construed as the narrator's attempts to locate that safe distance for himself.
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