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March 23, 2006

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

I've likely mentioned this before, but Mesh & Julian finally got me to read some Martin Amis, and I've been working my way through Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a novel about Stalin and the twenty million Russians who were murdered under early communist Russian rule, and, as Amis put it: "It feels necessary to record that, between Millennium Nigh and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty-six." Its also a remarkably personal book.

The opening couple of paragraphs:

Here is the second sentence of Robert' Conquet's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

"We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not ever word, but every letter, in this book."

That sentence represents 2,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

"Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat" (1,340 lives). "Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family's...lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases" (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman's essayistic documentary novel Forever Flowing: "And the children's faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or grog heads-thin, wide lips-and some of them resembled fish, mouths open" (3,880 lives).

Amis, later on in the Introduction:

I have written about the Holocaust, in a novel (Time's Arrow). Its afterword begins:

"This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four."

It feels necessary to record that, between Millenium Night and the true millennium a year later, my sister died at the age of forty-six.

I wish Mesh & Julian would write more, because I certainly don't have the needed literary/wordsmith abilities to do this novel any justice. The juxtaposition of personal tragedy with, as Amis would put it, the 20th century's "chief lacuna", is engrossing, absorbing, compelling, etc. But that doesn't even begin to do it justice.