Perhaps the correct place to start this review is 75% into the text. This is where I gave up on the book. My eye had started skipping to the end of paragraphs and I realised that it was no longer holding my interest; it had defeated me. So I went off and read a few reviews to see what other people thought and was genuinely surprised by the enthusiasm of some of the reviewers. Were we reading the same book? Nonsense is often a matter of perspective. Say to a caveman that one day man would travel to the moon and he’d say, “Nonsense,” or at least grunt to indicate his innate scepticism in your assertion. Provided with sufficient information he would, however, have to admit that he’d been a tad premature in his judgement. I had 75% of the available facts before me and I still couldn’t see where this book was going but once a kind reviewer pointed out that at the 95% mark all would become clear—a single sentence does the job—I went back to the text and, indeed, much, if not all, does indeed become clear and, of course, all the clues were there. The first clue is Elsa’s shadow:There is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her. Behind her, and cast by what light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There’s no light shining upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. Physical laws dictate the placement, length and intensity of shadows. As soon as you learn that Elsa’s shadow does not behave normally you have to ask yourself: What kind of book am I reading? What kind of book indeed? I knew little about it when I started it. I knew that Elsa had encountered a man working in a shoe shop who she believed was Helmut Kiel, a German prisoner of war she’d met in England:She remembers Kiel very well. She remembers what happened when we were engaged during the war. She knows that Kiel was a double agent and went to prison after the war. She heard that he died in prison and now she’s seen him in New York. But if one makes any appeal to her sense of its significance she’s not interested. She’s away and out of reach. I therefore assumed that this book was going to be like The Night Porter, The Man in the Glass Booth or Death and the Maiden, an encounter with someone disagreeable from her past. That Elsa is being treated for some kind of mental illness I expected this to figure in when it came to identifying who the man calling himself Mueller. Her friend, Poppy (who she met at the same time), goes to the store and seems similarly convinced: ‘I went back to the shoe store today, Poppy,’ Elsa says to the Princess. ‘I bought some boots,’ Elsa says, ‘fur-lined, that I don’t need, Poppy, because I wanted to have another look. The other day I bought these shoes I’m wearing—do you like them? He looks like Kiel, too young. Could he be Kiel’s son, do you think?’ ‘He’s Kiel,’ says Poppy. ‘Kiel with a face-lift. When I went to the store I looked close, my dear, and I saw it was truly Kiel. After all, he was very young when we knew him during the war; very young. He must have had his face lifted, it looks quite stretched at the eyes. You go again and look close, Elsa. You look close. He’s stiff at the waist. I bought a pair of evening shoes to be sent C.O.D. but naturally I gave a false name and address. I’ve got five pairs of evening shoes already. What do I want with more? I rarely wear them. Did you notice how he bends, stiff at the knees, thick at the waist, like a prisoner of long years. As he has been.’ Of course logic dictates that the shoe seller couldn’t possibly be the man; his son is a possibility but not the same man as Poppy and Elsa are convinced he is.And then there’s the odd exchange at the beginning of the sixth chapter between Elsa and her husband, Paul: ‘Go back, go back to the grave,’ says Paul, ‘from where I called you.’ ‘It’s too late,’ Elsa says. ‘It was you with your terrible and jealous dreams who set the whole edifice soaring.’ ‘You’re not real. Pierre and Katerina don’t exist.’ ‘Don’t we?’ she says. ‘Well then that settles the argument. Just carry on as if nothing has happened all these years.’ Surely they’re talking metaphorically. It’s like when someone says, “You’re dead to me,” isn’t it? As the book progresses one has to wonder if there’s anyone who isn’t mad. Of course the one thing I’ve forgotten to mention is that Elsa is filthy rich and normal rules of convention don’t apply to the super-rich. I can still see Peter Sellers cutting the nose from out of a painting he’s just paid £30,000 (in 1969) in front of an aghast art director played by John Cleese in The Magic Christian. Indeed there’s a lot of plain silliness in the book, a book that I really didn’t expect to be describing as silly in the slightest. Elsa, for example, returns from a trip abroad talking about a diet involving over-ripe tomatoes which her therapist (who’s been doing double-duty as her butler) acquires for her; the next time we see of the tomatoes she’s hurling them at the actors in a stage production of Peter Pan featuring only actors over sixty and produced by her son (who she insists on referring to as “the writer”). That the lead is also known to her from her war days should also have raised my suspicions. Have I said too much? To be honest once I knew what was happening I was relieved. Perhaps I’m thick—and considering the amount of source material I have available to me and am dying to tell you about—I should be embarrassed for not cottoning-on sooner but there you go. I blame my expectations. That said I’m not a big fan of silliness and there’s a fine line which anyone who’s watched all four series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus will agree with me on. Silly can be many things but at times all it manages to be is silly. I will say no more.Most people will only know Spark as the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I haven’t read the book but I’ve seen adaptations. If, like me, that’s all you know of her then this is another way you’re likely to be disappointed. Again, not the author’s fault. What she does she does she does well enough. Interestingly the book was begun in begun in the late sixties during the brief period of her life that she lived in New York but not finished and published until after she moved to Rome and clearly one she struggled with. What you have to ask is: If we got to see the Statue of Liberty at the start of Planet of the Apes would it ruin the film or enhance it? Tom Stoppard lays his cards on the table when he entitles his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; no room for doubt there. I’m not sure that the reveal is worth wading through 95% of the book. If she’d done something radically different then perhaps.
Muriel Spark, she's famous right? My only reference comes from Colin Firth referring to Ruth Gemmell as Miss Jean Brodie in the movie adaptation of Nicky Hornby's Fever Pitch. A tenuous connection indeed to somebody made a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature. I had a vague perception of copious stuffy studies of the class structure of Britain but thanks to this beautiful first edition of one of her obscurities received as a birthday gift I can safely lay those preconceived notions to rest.The Hothouse By The East River is a strange little book of a sightly surreal nature, in fact it turns out that there's very little reality involved in this tale, but the nature of the participants and their doing cannot be discussed without very real spoilers. The pleasure comes from the slow reveal of details and the final revelation that draws all that came before in to sharp focus. And it's funny too!
Do You like book The Hothouse By The East River (1973)?
Published in 1973, this short, bizarre novel has no satisfactory resolution. The characters are together in New York and were also British and/or German spies in WWII. They do typically New York things, go to bars and restaurants, dance, go to off off Broadway theatre in the Village and endure much psychoanalysis. It has hilarious moments and great turns of phrase, but none of the loose ends really tie up. A woman whose shadow goes in the wrong direction must be symbolic of something, but what? In the end you wonder if they even exist, and if they don't exist, what can it possibly all mean?
—Kyle
First sentence: "If it were only true that all's well that ends well, if it were only true."Last sentence: "She turns to the car, he following her, watching as she moves how she trails her faithful and lithe cloud of unknowing across the pavement." From Schultreff.de: In 1944 Paul Hazlett is working in the Compound, a secret government department in Britain, which specialized in propaganda broadcasts over Europe. There he falls in love with Elsa Janovic who is also engaged with black propaganda and psychological warfare in this particular Compound. Other members of the Compound are Miles Bunting, Princes Xavier, Colonel Tylden and several prisoners of war. Among those POWs is Helmut Kiel, a German who has chosen to work for the enemy and is now broadcasting for the Compound. Elsa and Kiel happen to have a love affair and after a few months Kiel is sent back to the prison camp. From there he goes on the air in a prisoners of war exchange-of-greetings programme betraying the identity of the Compound, which was supposed to be an authentic underground German station. Six or seven years after war Kiel dies in prison. In late spring of 1944 Paul, Elsa and the other members of their intelligence unit gather in a hotel in London having just returned from a mission to the United States. Paul tells his colleagues that he has got a good job waiting for him in America and a place to stay for Elsa and him. The next day they get ready to go back to the country when a V-2 bomb hits them direct just as their train starts pulling out and Paul, Elsa, Princess Xavier, Miles Bunting and Colonel Tylden die. Paul believes to be the only survivor of the bomb attack although he is dead and after some time he imagines to live together with Elsa in an antiquated apartment by the East River in New York. He is convinced that he has dreamt up Elsa, who now is his wife, their children Pierre and Katerina and Princess Xavier. From a certain point on he is sure that those „imagined“ people have become real due to his imagination. In fact neither of them is real. They have risen from the dead or as in the case of Pierre and Katerina they never really existed. Nevertheless they live among people who are real and alive. They are even considered to be real persons by everyone else. Though there seems to be something wrong with Elsa. Paul realises that she is casting a shadow in the wrong direction; her shadow falls in a different angle to evryone else's shadow no matter from where the light shines upon her. In addition to that Elsa needs to meet he analyst quite often as she is departing from reason from time to time. She spends her day mainly by sitting by window and looking at the East River. Approximately 30 years after their death Elsa tells Paul that she has recognised a salesman in a shoe store to be Helmut Kiel. Paul does not believe her as he is certainly put out that Kiel died in prison and knowing that his wife is mad. But after proving her statement and having seen the man himself he believes that this certain person is Helmut Kiel although he ought to look much older. Paul now feels in danger from Kiel because he thinks that Kiel has returned to haunt him in order to take revenge for his imprisonment. Kiel calls himself Mueller and when Elsa goes back to the shoe store to talk to him he denies to be Kiel and claims that he was not yet born in 1944. Paul tells his son Pierre about Kiel but Pierre does not show any interest whereas Katerina is curious about Kiel. In the end Paul is sitting in a bar watching a group of people consisting of Elsa, Princess Xavier, Kiel and Miles Bunting. When another man heads towards the group he knows that it is Colonel Tylden, another person from the Compound. Then Paul gets up, grasps Elsa's arm and pulls her out of the bar heading towards a night-club. This is when Elsa tells Paul that he also died in the bomb attack in 1944. When they realise that the group are following them they continue their escape through several discos and clubs. In a hotel they happen to arrive at the golden wedding of two old friends and afterwards they visit Pierre and Katerina telling them that they (Pierre and Katerina) do not exist. Finally Paul goes to see his oldest friend once more and at the very end Paul and Elsa stand in front of their apartment block at the East River seeing that the old building is pulled down in order to be replaced by a modern one. Just at that moment Princess Xavier, Kiel, Miles Bunting and Colonel Tylden pass by in a car and take Paul and Elsa back with them so that they can have peace.I had never read anything written by Muriel Spark, although I knew her by name, so I really didn't know what to expect. But this novella totally came as a surprise. It took me a while to realise that everything was not what it seemed and that there was more to it than remembering a love-story from long ago. I thought this was so intriguing that I couldn't put the book down and read it in one sitting.I will definitely read more books by Spark, because I like stories with a little unexpected twist, and I am curious to see if her other books are like that also.
—Nadyne
my favorite quote from this book: ‘Haven’t we got enough serious problems in this city? We already have the youth problem, the racist problem, the distribution problem, the political problem, the economic problem, the crime problem, the matrimonial problem, the ecological problem, the divorce problem, the domiciliary problem, the consumer problem, the birth-rate problem, the middle-age problem, the health problem, the sex problem, the incarceration problem, the educational problem, the fiscal problem, the unemployment problem, the physiopsychodynamics problem, the homosexual problem, the traffic problem, the heterosexual problem, the obesity problem, the garbage problem, the gyno-emancipation problem, the rent-controls problem, the identity problem, the bi-sexual problem, the uxoricidal problem, the superannuation problem, the alcoholics problem, the capital gains problem, the anthro-egalitarian problem, the trisexual problem, the drug problem, the civic culture and entertainments problem which is something else again, the—'this is yet another baffling book that i have read in my muriel spark marathon. i was hooked from the beginning till the end. so, are all of them (view spoiler)[ ghosts? or paul's figment of imagination? or the effects from living in a hothouse? (hide spoiler)]
—Doreen
