(This is the only book I finished in February. And I took a really long time to make a note of it.) I have had this book since college. While I am sure I read some of it in school, I don’t think I read all of it until recently. It is a collection of short stories about life in a Nazi concentration camp, written by a concentration camp survivor. As with all holocaust literature, it documents atrocities I can scarcely imagine. This particular book does so in an unnervingly mundane way. Borowski writes about small details, like writing a letter to a lover in the next camp over, or listening to the camp orchestra (made up of prisoners who worked in the kitchen), or playing soccer while thousands of others walk to their deaths in the crematoria. Becoming “totally familiar with the inexplicable and the abnormal,” as he describes it, is eerie and unsettling.

Borowski’s words:

But this is how it is done: first just one ordinary barn, brightly whitewashed–and here they proceed to asphyxiate people. Later, four large buildings, accommodating twenty thousand at a time without any trouble. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis. Only several men directing traffic to keep operations running smoothly, and the thousands flow along like water from an open tap. All this happens just beyond the anaemic trees of the dusty little wood. Ordinary trucks bring people, return, then bring some more. No hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis.

Why is it that nobody cries out, nobody spits in their faces, nobody jumps at their throats? We doff our caps to the S.S. men returning from the little wood; if our name is called we obediently go with them to die, and–we do nothing. We starve, we are drenched by rain, we are torn from our families. What is this mystery? This strange power of one man over another? This insane passivity that cannot be overcome? Our only strength is our great number–the gas chambers cannot accomodate all of us.

This is another book that’s been hanging around for years, and it’s nice to finally knock it off my list. I don’t remember starting to read this book at all, but I found a bookmark two thirds in, so apparently I did read a good part of it before. For whatever reason, it didn’t stick the first time. That probably says more about me than it does about the book. I did find it difficult to get into the book in the beginning, but eventually I found myself involved and caring about what happened next, so I’m glad I kept reading until I reached that point.

To the Lighthouse is unique in that almost entirely written in the subjective. We hear what the characters are thinking and feeling, and about how they see and interpret their environment and the other characters, but we do not get an objective view of what’s really happening. And so through this device, the entire book is a question about reality — which becomes more obvious towards the end. It’s not a question about reality in the way that Henry James approaches it in Turn of the Screw; no one is crazy or unhinged. It reminds me more of what I was thinking about when I read Housekeeping — each of us is a prisoner in our skin, our perceptions are uniquely ours, and although they may overlap with others’ perceptions, they are probably not a perfect fit. And as with Housekeeping, the characters in To the Lighthouse felt very lonely and disconnected to me, being as they were, trapped within themselves. This is a book that’s best read slowly, rich as it is the details of the inner lives of its characters.

Currently Reading:
Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert

Here’s my first of fifty:

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (****.5)
Amazon | BookMooch

This is a sad, lonely, lovely book. Thoughtful and clearly written. The language itself, apart from the story, is a pleasure to read. At points, I found it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time. This was primarily towards the end, as Ruthie discusses her thoughts on loneliness, and I think my difficulty came not from the book itself, but from the palpable sense of loneliness it evoked.

Housekeeping reminded me of one of my personal favorite quotes, from Tennessee Williams, “Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.” Many of the characters in the book seem trapped within themselves, unable to connect. Ruthie and Sylvie seem to understand their isolation, and to connect because of it. From Sylvie’s arrival, boundaries begin to blur in a way that parallels the development of the relationship between Ruthie and Sylvie. The distinction between inside and outside weakens, reality and imagination overlap, and memories and new experiences blend together. I did not anticipate how this book would end, but in retrospect, it ended just as it should.

Currently Reading
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Stumbling on Happiness – Daniel Gilbert