The books strength lies in the material de Waal uses, building in a detail a portrait of high society Belle Époque Paris where Charles Ephrussi assembles the collection of netsuke, and then its twin in fin de siècle Vienna, where the collection is passed to Viktor Ephrussi. Both branches of the Ephrussi family are, not to put too fine a point on it, stinking rich. Their homes are gilded and piled with art, antiques and objets, visited by poets, artists and people of importance. The Viennese Palais Ephrussi is a particularly monstrous creation, packed with rooms and plied by butlers and maids. Charles is a model for Proust’s Swann; Elizabeth, Vicktor’s daughter is a correspondent and friend of Rilke. De Waal has an eye for objects, textures, collections, material and spends a great deal of time evoking this material abundance but it seems on the page to risk intoxicating him; so much confection is nearly too much and the writing begins to take on the affected tone of the age in which he has immersed himself.

The French Ephrussis suffer the barbs of antisemitism in the age of the Dreyfus affair but it is the Vienna Ephrussis who are the centre of the book. The collapse of the Hapsburgs’ Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I diminshes them but they remain on the very peaks of Austrian society. The lead up to, and execution of, the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 by Hitler is perhaps the best worked part of the book. The intensity of the events, their hour by hour unfolding, and the noise and people on the streets followed by the raiding of the house and the expropriation of all this wealth is shocking. Menace matures to violence and the rapidity of action underlines the meticulous planning of the persecutions. The Ephrussis are made non-people like the other thousands upon thousands of Jewish Austrians, everything they own and seemingly wouldn’t abandon and flee, is taken: their palace, the thousands of loved books, the gifts, antiques, art, the family business. They escape, ultimately, via their country estate in Slovakia, to Tunbridge Wells of all places though Viktor’s wife, Ignace’s mother appears to commit suicide en route.

The little netsuke are hidden away in a mattress in Vienna by Anna, a maid deeply attached to the family who returns them to Viktor’s daughter Elisabeth when she returns after the war to Vienna to the shock of destruction and occupation. From here they travel to Japan with Ignace who arrives to work and live there in the ruins of post-war Tokyo, and finally are passed on to de Waal on his death.

The curious thing about this book, is just how frustrating I found it. The need of de Waal not to write a straight history of his family, to try and write at a remove and through the tale of the netsuke is unfortunate. The swimming in details of the elites of Paris and particularly Vienna is heightened to the point where you feel the book becomes myopic to the wider movement of society, class and history. The family float through time until the wave of history breaks over them. You feel perhaps the unspoken narrative of the book is of money. It is their elite moneyed background that ensures the Viennese Ephrussis survive the collapse after World War I, and though Viktor doesn’t heed other bankers advice to him to move money abroad in advance of the Anschluss, their dispersed cosmopolitan family rescue them from the horrific fate that befell other Austrians.

The maid who rescues the netsuke, who makes the whole story de Waal tells possible, Anna, is completely anonymous. De Waal admits not even knowing her surname. There is no relating what post-war, post-Ephrussi Vienna was like for her. There is mention of one family-member who dies in Theresienstadt but no relating of the particular place Thereseinstadt holds in the history of the destruction of the Viennese Jews, a role WG Sebald evoked in Austerlitz. In short de Waal is uncomfortable with directly referring to the wider orgy of destruction, the camps and the transports, the fate of Jews of Paris. Anything beyond the immediate horizon of his family is skirted. The book builds a fine portrait of a grandiose, luxuriant, rareified society but never manages to really relate the destruction of that society and its scale. Instead the story keeps turning inward to the family, just as de Waal continually returns to the strange little objects, the netsuke, that he carries in his pocket.

It is unfortunate to close a book that encompasses such an interesting period, family and characters and feel frustrated by the decisions of the author. The netsuke really don’t do for me what they clearly do for de Waal. They are the vehicle for relating the family’s history to himself but work poorly as a device for writing the family’s history.  I cannot shake the feeling that he should have gotten over his reticence and written a fuller, more traditional history of his family, their rise, their strange removed, moneyed place in the world and the catastrophic loss of that world and transformation of Europe. The book ends up just a little too removed and insular in tone and mood. The netsuke become not just a totem of the inheritance of one generation from another but also of the preciousness of the book’s author in obsessively relating this story. It’s a good book but there was a better book in here.

Last night at 9pm I sat on my bed and opened the first page of Man In The Dark, I put it down nearly three hours and two cups of tea later. A quick enough read so I thought I’d throw a quick review together.

I’ve read quite a few of Paul Auster’s books by now, though not his last two books, Travels in the Sciptorium and the Brooklyn Follies. So by point of comparison I have in the past really enjoyed Moon Palace,  his New York Trilogy and the more recent Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions. Man in the Dark probably won’t be sitting quite so high in my estimation .

The principal character of the book, August Brill, is also our narrator. An insomniac, he spends his night trying to distract his mind from people and events in his past, including the recent death of his wife. To this end he contrives a story involving a parallel America where a second civil war rages, with a protagonist called Owen Brick. The entirety of the novel unfolds in the sleepless mind of August, on his back, literally in the dark.

Like other Auster stories the narrative of Brill’s invented story develops a reflexivity, here leading him back to his own story and his own thoughts. There is however nothing particularly playful or engaging about this reflexivity, unlike say the notebooks in Oracle Night. The story within the story seems weak I felt, the fact of it’s being Brill’s distraction from his own story, made it a distraction to my own reading of the book itself. When we know that the story is only a distraction we don’t expect it do deliver much. Unless, and it wouldn’t have been beyond an Auster story, Brick, Brill’s invention walked through the door of his bedroom.

It didn’t seem quite as “meta” as other narrative twists Auster has conjured up.  I think I might have been happier to read the story of Brill’s Brick, but Brick is a hollow character and the Russian doll story that Brill places him is discarded quite easily by Brill.

The story of Brill, alluded to during the book and avoided by him because it will keep him awake, becomes the central concern of the last third of the novel, principally in conversation with his granddaughter Katya, also sleepless after the loss of her ex-boyfriend in Iraq. For this last third I found myself counting down the page numbers a little. Brill’s story just isn’t that interesting: the ins and outs of his marriage, his daughter Miriam, his granddaughter and her sense of loss and guilt. It all just felt a bit bloodless and nothing struck me as “passionate and shocking” or celebratory of “ordinary joys” to quote the back cover blurb. The brief stories concerning war seem a little cheaply sketched and unconnected to Brill. I was annoyed to have tor read an entire description of the plot of Ozu’s film Tokyo Story, a film I haven’t seen but have intended to. I’ll watch that myself thank you very much.

The narrative, being played out in Brill’s head, is the most banal I’ve read in an Auster book yet. August Brill is a morose unengaging character, and his creation Brick, a magician thrown into a war is empty.

• My over all response: Meh..

• Read instead: The New York Trilogy

]]> http://www.delexical.com/tangents/2008/08/26/quick-review-man-in-the-dark-by-paul-auster/feed/ 0