Favorite Quotes from Amis' House of Meetings

Below are a few favorite quotes from Martin Amis' House of Meetings.

You are as well-prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital;  and your skin is a beautiful color.  Look at you--look at the burnish of you.

..this is a love story.  All right, Russian love.  But still love.

Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you'd expect a verst to be the equivalent of--I don't know--thirty-nine miles.  It's barely more than a kilometer.

Moscow is impressive--grimly fantastic in its pelf.

The Siberian expanse, the olive-green immensity--it would frighten you, I think;  but it makes Russians feel important.

All the money has been divided up between the felons and the state.

My story would be even worse in Russian.  For it is truly a tale of gutterals and nasals and whistling sibilants.

It's not the USSR I don't like.  What I don't like is the northern Eurasian plain.  I don't like the "directed democracy," and I don't like Soviet power, and I don't like tsars, and I don't like Mongol overlords, and I don't like the theocratic dynasts of old Moscow and Kiev.

There is in front of me on the screen of my computer, the graph with its two crinkly lines intersecting, one pink, one blue.  The birth rate, the death rate.  They call it the Russian cross.

By now the five-week Arctic summer was under way.  It was as if nature woke up in July and realized how badly she had neglected her guests;  and then of course she completely overdid it. There was something gushing and hysterical in the show she put on...

There were in fact enormous quantities of thwarted love, of trapped love, in the slave archipelago.

The Secret Speech caused a planetary sensation.  It was "the first time" a Russian leader had ever acknowledged the transgressions of the state.  It was the first time.  It was the last time too, more or less...

Joseph Vissarionovich:  I knew his face better than I knew my own mother's.

You must try to imagine it, the disgusting proximity of the state, its body odor, its breath on your neck, its stupidly expectant stare.

But at the time we had no idea what was going on.  We never had any idea what was going on.

You have consumed your share of Russian novels:  every time a new character appears, there is a chapter break and you are suddenly reading about his grandparents.  This too is a digression.  And its import is sexual.

That's how a "love triangle" could be wonderfully simplified.  An anonymous phone call, an unsigned letter, to the secret police.

...the shortage of housing was slightly eased by the shortage of people...

Universal dissatisfaction took the following form:  everyone everywhere complained about everything.

Come over here to participate in the Soviet experiment, he told the CP man who issued his passport that he was fully prepared to take the big cut in his standard of living.  That same day he got the quarter--twenty-five years. And were you praising America?

I remember the convocations of the Komsomol:  try to imagine something halfway between a temperance meetings and a Nurenberg Rally.

Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism:  fascism.

Over here, now, there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis.  It is brought to you and it is always the same.  It is death.

The train rocks and knocks across the simplified land forms of the tundra: Russia's great white page, awaiting the characters and sentences of history.

In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies.  Rather, flies died like people.

At the moment of arrest you already feel halfway vanished.  In prison you're a former person and already dead.  In camp you're almost sure you've never been.

The sound seemed to trumpet the dawn of a new dominion (more savage, more stupid, more certain) and to repudiate the laxity and amateurism of the day before.

"...if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion." But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply dissappear--if God is a Russian.

I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system--the first being terror.

Now [Stalin] was nowhere.  But he used to be everywhere. 

I knew then that massacres want to happen.  Massacres want there to be massacres. 

The center--I could feel it tugging at me, with its women and its money.  And in the late summer of 1958 I started orbiting Moscow. 

Between 1946 and 1957 I ate two apples, one in 1949 and one in 1955. 

He despised my appetite.  I had drive, and all Russians hate that. 

We were both subject to the centuries-old momentum of Russian drunkenness

Now, smoking (like drinking) allays anxiety.  So try not smoking in Russia and see how far you get.

The Gulag in Fiction

Like many people, I have relied upon nonfiction books such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History to help me understand one of the twentieth century's greatest moral catastrophes.  This past month, I dipped into several works of modern fiction to see what novelists could do to further explain the historical and moral meaning of Stalin's grand experiment with systematic cruelty and economic exploitation.  The first book, Martin Amis' House of Meetings is a powerful work of fiction predicted to some extent on the Amis family's historical antagonism to Stalinism, previously discussed in his memorable nonfiction account of Stalin's legacy, Koba the Dread:  Laughter and the Twenty Million.  For me, the best part of House of Meetings is that Amis gives the denizens of the gulag a great deal of agency.  That is to say, Amis' narrator is not merely a victim, but also a multidimensional character capable of inflicting both good and evil on those around him.  Amis' novel provides readers with a detailed description of the violence, brutality, and hunger associated with life in the gulag, but it also manages to tell a story of love and hate that is not completely subsumed by the coercive exigencies of prison life in Russia's inhospitable northern climates.  The protagonist of the House of Meetings is not a martyr, but a typical Russian who has been at one time or the other both an exploited person and one who has exploited others.  In fact, Amis is careful to tell us that his protagonist had raped Russian women in the course of his participation in the conquest of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II.  Thus, Amis' protagonist has already been victim and the victimiser prior to his experience in the camp.  And both in the camp, and after the camp, the narrator will possess his moral Janus-head:  on the one hand, the narrator nobly protects his defenseless brother from camp villains, but on the other hand,  employs extreme forms of violence to do so. 

Perhaps the moral ambiguity of the narrator is fitting for a story of the gulag, where innocence quickly disappeared in a savage fight for existence against guards, the so-called "bitches" and "brutes," and other camp actors.  Certainly gulag characters deserve to be depicted as something other than passive recipients of communist cruelty.  Another excellent approach to the gulag was written by novel prize-winner, Herta Muller, an ethnic German from Romania whose own mother once survived a deportation to the gulag.  Muller's treatment of camp life is meticulous.  It's creative power stems from the fact that Muller has analyzed so many components of gulag life in such exquisite detail.  In fact, each chapter of The Hunger Angel explores an extremely specific facet of camp life, such as bread-hoarding, in order to depict or even create a complete universe of suffering for readers.  Like Amis, Muller does acknowledge that her protagonists were not purely the subjects of history.  As ethnic Germans, they had listened to German propaganda and felt a great deal of sympathy for the German Chancellor.  Although they had not personally committed any crimes against humanity, they had been typical of men and women in the 1930s had done little to resist the advancing tide of totalitarianism. More than that, they had not even realized Hitlerism was an evil.  And then again in the camps, Muller's subjects were thrown into a moral morass almost incapable of supporting the existence of heroes. 

A third creative approach to the gulag appears in Anthony Marra's wonderfully witty and wise collection of linked short stories, entitled The Tsar of Love and Techno. Although Marra's book isn't centered in the gulag, it does demonstrate the centrality of the slave labor system to twentieth century Russian lives.  Marra's short stories span seven or so decades, but in each case the gulag plays an important direct or indirect role in character story-lines.  Characters are either worried about being sent to the gulag in the Great Terror, struggling to survive the gulag, or living in its shadow.   Marra's book has much to recommend it.  Its dialogue is clever, its stories linked together in original ways, and its depiction of both Soviet and post-Soviet life spot on.  But perhaps the book's best quality is the way in which Marra, like the other authors mentioned in this post, gives agency to his characters without ignoring the tragedy of gulag life.  For Marra, the gulag seems to be both a microcosm of totalitarianism and also an explanation of both the demographic and moral state of modern Russia.  Although Marra ends his story by dwelling on the moral morass of the Chechen conflict, he seems to be saying that it wouldn't have been possible without the lasting effects of the authoritarian legacy of the Great Terror and its associated prison system.