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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Felix is force fed a gigantic omelet, July 3, 2010
This review is from: The Breaking of Eggs: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)
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"One can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." - attributed to (among others) Lenin, Napoleon and Robespierre. Well, to whomever.
"I grew up in an age of mass movements ... and it was a question only of which one to choose, and you chose the one that most opposed the ones you did not wish to choose." - Felix Zhukovski
Born in Poland, 9-year old Felix Zhukovski, the protagonist of THE BREAKING OF EGGS, was sent by his mother, with his older brother Woodrow - named after the former U.S. President - to live with their aunt in Basel, Switzerland a week before the Nazi invasion in September 1939. Woodrow soon left to join the French Resistance. Felix has not discovered the whereabouts of his mother, or attempted to contact his brother, since.
Now, it's 1991 and Felix is 61 and has been living in the same Paris apartment for thirty-six years. Almost his entire life, he's been a committed communist, though his own term for his political stance is "leftist." Felix despises capitalism and the United States, where his brother has long since gone to live. Zhukovski's spiritual home is the Eastern Bloc, and he makes an annual tour of its member countries to research and update a travel guide he authors and publishes for the benefit of those few Westerners visiting the nations on the far side of the Iron Curtain.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and Eastern Europe changed drastically - so much so that Felix can't keep up with the changes in his book. Then, a New York publisher - one of those detested Americans - offers to buy him out.
THE BREAKING OF EGGS is the story of a man who discovers late in life that his worldview and the most important decisions of his adulthood have been based on misconceptions, misperceptions, disinformation, misinformation and self-deception. Felix is about to have his basket of eggs force fed to him as an omelet of gargantuan proportions. Can he suck it up and co-exist with the new world order?
Viewing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact from the unflappable serenity of my armchair in the United States, I, and presumably most others from similar vantage points, didn't pause to contemplate the enormous repercussions of those events on people whose lives were tied to the fortunes and political philosophy of the Eastern Bloc nations. As a topic for reflection, then, the plot of author Jim Powell's THE BREAKING OF EGGS is, at least for me, both fresh and winning. While there are no plot twists that would categorize this novel as a "thriller", Felix encounters enough unexpected revelations to severely perturb his post-Cold War state of mind.
This is, apparently, Powell's first published novel, and kudos are due. The characters are engaging and distinctly drawn and the dialogue between them is believable. This is a fine read that's worthy of your consideration about the tragedies, humor and absurdities of politics taken oh so seriously and the human condition.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
POLES APART, June 17, 2010
This is a powerful effort and no mistake. It is 1991, the Berlin Wall had fallen two years earlier and the Soviet Union has now followed it. In Paris a 61-year-old Polish exile who had been smuggled out of Poland by his mother in 1939 just in time to evade the nazis is about to retire, selling up his business that published a gullible lefties' guide to eastern Europe, a publication that informed its readership inter alia that East Germany was a leading example of economic advancement. Feliks has always been self-sufficient. He has never married, for instance, but it is in his political ideas that his mental and temperamental isolation are seen clearly. His life has been about politics and not about people, a particular kind of left-wing politics that any European born within 10 or a dozen years of him will recognise instantly.
Feliks is a prig, and so were a whole tranche of his generation. Even at the time some of us who also think ourselves as on the left were mystified not just by the refusal on the part of other socialists to recognise the filthy nature of Stalin's regime but even more baffled by the emotional and personal way such flat-earthers reacted when the plain bleedin' obvious was pointed out to them. Feliks is too arrogant and insulated to misbehave in quite this way, but he compensates for this lapse into rationality by telling himself, in all apparent sincerity, that his view of socialism and communism is based on what he calls logic. He is given unintended support in this delusion by his café debating-partner (how Parisian!) who tries to refute him with a counter-assertion that all such political notions are founded on what he calls emotion.
To my own mind the other debater is only using the wrong term. If he had said `values and priorities' then I would go along. Feliks, again in my own view, is guilty of a much deeper misconception. He takes the stance (and how well one got to know it) that aberrations of Soviet communism were mere incidental lapses, stumbles along the path to a perfect society. For someone so conceited intellectually, he seems awfully unaware of ordinary epistemology. `Perfect' says who, and why should we believe them, whoever they are? A perfect society, supposing the expression means anything at all, is not something demonstrable like a perfect fifth in music. Perfect in this context is not a `descriptive' term but an `evaluative' one, to borrow the terminology of R M Hare in The Language of Morals. It is an accolade that is bestowed on a theoretical society by some who happen to like the idea of it. As the book progresses, and Feliks's fateful little business transaction brings him into touch with other people and other experiences, he is also confronted with the possibility (to say the least) that the supposedly incidental aberrations were not incidents but the main theme of communist so-called advancement, and the soi-disant lofty objective is possibly neither here nor there.
I believe that the author is taking a stance in the matter. He may seem to be relativistic compared with the doctrinaire rigidity of Feliks, but I think he is arguing that certainty in political matters is not like certainty in mathematics. It is a matter of what convinces us, for whatever reason. It reminds me of a once-famous exam question that began `What can be said with confidence about...?' which received the incontrovertible answer `Anything at all. Just say it with confidence.' I am also quite sure that his main message to us is that stuffy know-alls like Feliks were guilty of systematic self-deception. They do not, when push comes to shove, really believe what they have been telling themselves they believe.
Layer after layer of scales drops from the eyes of Feliks as he successively meets a fellow member of the anti-nazi resistance (not at first recognised, and later to become the debating opponent), the purchaser of his printing business in New York, his half-brother in America, his former lover and his daughter of whom he had not even known. As well as experiencing America and East Germany he visits Poland, prompted by the contents of a near-unbearable letter from his late mother that some determined research had unearthed. He is seeing and hearing how it was for people with other experiences than his own, people who in particular did not inhabit ivory towers printing ridiculous little processed-lefty publications. One saving grace he always had was a sense of humour, not the greatest in the world, but infinitely better than nothing. Indeed I am pleased to say in this notice that the book, although it is `about ideas' in one sense, is about people as well. Ideas were basic to the personality and mentality of our hero, and the story of his progressive disillusionment is a very human story in my own opinion.
The style of writing is good, relating a modern pilgrim's progress that I found completely gripping. There is a political message too, I am quite convinced. The sermon is one exhorting rationality and being honest with oneself. A hint of something verging on despair glimmers through just once or twice, but it does not gain dominance. There is even something like a happy ending. I could, to be frank, have done without that, but the story was over by then and what I was happiest about was to have read the case for political realism uncheapened by what often goes by that or some similar term.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Subtle and extraordinary novel of ideas and late-life change, August 1, 2010
This review is from: The Breaking of Eggs: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The ironically-named Felix has always been a man of ideas, very precisely defined leftist ones. Although he made his living as a self-employed travel writer (odd in several ways for a socialist), he lived within a very narrow compass. Despite outward appearances, he has also been full of longing for various figures of his past, all lost to him in the aftermath of WWII.
Late in life, he finds out that almost all of his knowledge about his early life is wrong. I won't spoil the surprises by telling you how or what, but he does find out many things. And, unlike most fictional or real people, he accepts that he was wrong and rebuilds his life and his ideas. And there are several rewards for this.
None of this is told dramatically, but the story is vivid. We stay inside the head of the first-person narrator, but there's no feeling of confinement. Perhaps some of the characters speak too perfectly, but that's one of the risks of writing. Shakespeare's guards and farmers also speak too perfectly, and we don't mind. Not that Jim Powell is Shakespeare. But he has created a beautiful, subtle, and unusual novel in which we get to see an older person take the rare opportunity to change and grow.
And the novel is funny in places - not many laugh out loud moments, but plenty of subtle humor.
Unless you're a committed ideologue (of any stripe) yourself, you will enjoy this novel. Felix gets to make quite an omelette from the broken eggs. Lucky readers get to witness.
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