History (Penguin Audiobooks)

Rating:
Summary: You had to be there, I guess...
Review: This book came highly recommended to me via Tom Disch's book, "The Castle of Indolence", a wonderful compilation of commentaries on poetry. I was, and am, especially interested in the long poem as a unique form, and this "Novel in Verse" seemed worth a look.

"History: The Home Movie" intends to take an under-the-covers, yellowing underbelly view of a history which includes the intersection of the author's family and that of Boris Pasternak through the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. Rather than the grand sweep of events and armies we are offered a look through the refracted lens of personal peccadillo and hidden, twisted lives. An interesting prospect which did not carry this reader past the halfway mark.

The difficulty that I found was twofold. The reader needs to be well-versed in the details of lifestyles and events during that era in history. Raine's cryptic and rather chopped poetic language is evocative but peppered with period references that simply eluded me - in large part because of what was presumably left out to satisfy the muse. Furthermore, you need a chart to keep track of the characters and their various Russian nicknames and given names and cousins and friends. I'm not kidding ! There really is a chart; a pair of family-trees adorn the frontspiece. Prhaps they warn that the author realized at some point that the language and story themselves would not manage to support the superstructure of the characters as individuals or to define their interrelationships.

SO... you will find yourself reading a segment which takes the point of view of one whom you eventually realize is some sort of doctor who you eventually realize (if your bag of historic detail is loaded up) is doing the mummification of Lenin that left him preserved for generations of Soviets to view under glass. That time I "got it", but I plowed through many other sections thinking I would understand what was going on if only I had paid more attention to my Doestotevsky.

The end result, perhaps intended, but not satisfying, is more of an Ashbery'ish walk through shards of history which sometimes, briefly, clump into nodes of meaning or reference, but otherwise only provide a broad music. Verse, perhaps but not a novel.