Customer Reviews

The Breaking of Eggs: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

This most highy engaging book reads more like a autobiography than a fictional novel. Most impressive is how the author managed to capture with such accuracy and precision, the details and nuances of an eccentric Central European character, Feliks Zhukovsky, who lives in Paris. The reader is priviliged to know his thoughts, feelings, accomplishments, political persuasions and aspirations in life, all of which make for excellent reading. The novel starts with an amusing anecdote about an illness which presumably became the catalyst for Feliks to eventually learn about his complex personal family history, become reunited with his brother from whom he was separated during World War II, when Feliks was still a child and his brother a teenager, and finally renunite with a romantic, love interest from twenty years ago. The reader is hooked by the character's personality, mannerisms, and depth of life experience. In an amusing manner, told from the first person, Feliks recounts his life story from the beginning when he arrived in France and how he became a Communist, and a writer for the propaganda newpaper for the Communist party. He quit the party in the late 1960s and the reader learns the reason why ,although he remained a leftist thinker and socialist in his political beliefs the remainder of his life.

For over forty years Feliks lived in Paris although he never really thought of Paris as "home". Essentially he always felt like an immigrant or visiter despite spending most of his adut life there. Feliks was the author of a travel guide book to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, when these were not popular tourist destinations. He updated his book yearly which was then published and sold by the publisher who was his friend. Feliks took trips to the main cities of Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the Soviet Union every two years to keep himself current and provide accurate information for his book. From the mid fifites until the break-up of the Soviet Union, Feliks was engaged in writing his Guide book and publishing it yearly. After the Communist strangle hold on Eastern Europe was released, Feliks life took a different and fascinating turn. Right after the Berlin wall was dismantled, everything in Feliks' life went totally awry, topsy turvey.

Things became problematic for Feliks after the summer of 1990. He realized his book would have to have major revisions after the countries about which he wrote became independent and no longer belonged in the Communist bloc. It was his good fortune that around this time, an American publishing company offered to buy the rights to his "Guide". Feliks met with the publisher's representative and came to an agreement. It is amazing how the author tied together details of Feliks personal history and the sale of his "Guide" to open a path for Feliks to meet his brother, with whom he has not communicated for over forty years. His brother had immigrated to America. Feliks visits his brother in Ohio, and is amazed by his American lifestyle, which includes a real estate career, a wife, children and grandchildren. Feliks is no longer the lonely bachelor and immigrant. His life has blossomed in unimaginable ways! Yet, there is more to come! He travels down another tangential path in his life by visiting East Germany. Naturally, Feliks tries to rekindle the flame of a past romance, and while doing so, he discovers a well kept secret which gives him bittersweet moments that turn his life completely around once again! The reader will be pleased how the author ended this novel and the 360 degrees circle traveled by Feliks to self discovery! This novel held my full attention from start to finish. It felt and read like a true-to-life story. Feliks present, past and hope-filled future are worth discovering and pondering. Erika Borsos [pepper flower]

Synopsis of my background: I grew up in poland until 1981. We fled 3 weeks before
military took over. Early adulthood then in Western West and US ;-)
so I gather I have both perspectives.

Form: Slightly Philosophical Novel. A distinct, dry, novel style of writing, I would
call it a 'perfectly translated French'. It is much more attune to feelings than
any normal writing (with English being mainly an 'operative' language) and
preserving the quality of 'surreal' detachment that French have in their
tongue while abandoning the baroque entanglement that makes French
obfuscate any clear cause and effect.
Content: The writer has both done research to the point where he really starts
to understand what 'communism', 'Poland in 2nd world war', 'Stalin' really
meant in shaping millions of human lives. In parts he voiced things the same
way smart Poles that lived through the ordeal would voice them (in my experience).
His description of the Warsaw Uprising in the Mother's letter is some of the best
writing I came across the last few years.
He succeeds at the same time to frame the issue in a larger context,
abstracting from the painful personal experience to huge rips of historical
currents without the fallacy of forgetting the price such an abstraction
extrudes, in fact making this fallacy the major stay of his plot.
Target Audience: Any intelligent Western person willing to look over the border
of the sump they are mired in, 'consumerism', the unlikely bastard of 'globalization' and
'democracy', which is a quote from the book.
Overall: A must read for any intelligent Western person ditto. This is modern
history governing modern man, no inevitability here, no logic as naive Marx
& Engels were thinking. But no rationalization of the circumstances governing
men that the Age of Enlightenment raised to the principles of life.

Feliks Zhukovski, the main character in Jim Powell's The Breaking of Eggs, is an ex-patriot Pole spending his life in Paris when he's not updating his guidebook to sights in Eastern Europe. A one-time Communist who now calls himself a leftist, Zhukovski has seen many of Europe's upheavals beginning with World War II. The latest upheaval is the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism - events that have left him disheartened because they betray the promise he once saw in the Communist system.

Set in 1991, Zhukovski's life is suddenly as chaotic as the new Europe he sees around him. For starters, an American publishing company is wanting to buy his guidebook. Initially reluctant to part with his guidebook - especially to a capitalist company - Zhukovski starts down a path that will lead through much of Europe's 20th century history and to a much changed Feliks.

On a trip to the United States, Zhukovski makes the decision to sell his guidebook. While in the U.S., Feliks decides to look up his long-lost brother who now lives in Ohio. The two men have not seen each other since the early years of World War II when his older brother ran off to join the Resistance. Though still highly distrustful of Americans, Feliks embraces his new-found family after decades of living alone in Paris. Once set in motion, the momentum of Feliks' life picks up speed and quite a few eggs get broken ... not the least of which is Feliks' once insular life and perceptions.

To say too much of what Feliks encounters would be to spoil the fun of tracing his journeys and discovering his past for the first time. There are moments of humor as well as heart-breaking loss. At the heart of the novel is the story of one man's gradual discovery that the past is not always what it appears, the truth is sometimes subjective, and that making progress (or omlets) requires breaking some eggs.

The Breaking of Eggs is more than just the story of a former Communist coming face to face with some of that system's "grave errors." It's a story that could be written about any ideology that places loyalty to a particular system above being humane to our fellow humans. It could just as easily be about liberal vs. conservative or secular vs. religious or any other current or past ideological chasm. I think the message Powell wants us to take away from this novel is that ideologies of any shade do more to insulate us from the world than helping to define a place for us in it.

What if the foundations of our lives are pulled out from under us all at once, so that we no longer know who we are? What if we discover that the attitudes and beliefs with which we identify are based on crumbling foundations, as is our behavior and lifestyle choices? What do we experience? How do we cope? Do we stumble and fall, crawl to new ground, or construct new structures from the dust of the past and the formless present?

Do we jettison our outdated beliefs, and switch to the opposite points of view? Do we attempt to deny the change, and build new illusions? Or do we slowly face and accept emerging realities and by trial-and-error learn to live in what is now an unknown world? Do we reinvent the past as we become architects of a radically different present and previously inconceivable future?

The Breaking of Eggs is a brilliant novel, and not only because of its plot, historical perspective, characters, dialogue, thesis, themes and writing style. It also profoundly explores the process of both inward and outward change - through the protagonist, Feliks Zhukovsvi. As Feliks experiences his past collapsing and is compelled to remake himself, so we may feel challenged to question the assumptions we have held and the choices we have made, and to begin to demolish any "Berlin Wall" we have erected against parts of ourselves or the world we have not been willing to face. In the process, we, along with Feliks, may become the eggs that are breaking - but we also have the opportunity to make ourselves a first-class omelet.

Our hero Feliks is a 61 year old Polish leftist intellectual and ex-communist who lives in Paris and authors an East European tour guide. When the Berlin Wall falls and his publisher closes shop, an American publisher offers to buy the rights to his guide - planning to significantly alter its political perspective. As a result, Feliks is compelled to make his first trip to the much-hated U.S. of A. to negotiate.

Fifty years previously, a week before the Nazis invaded Poland, Felik's mother had sent him and his older brother from Poland to safety in France. Feliks never saw his mother again, and soon his brother disappeared into the French resistance. Then after the war, when the Berlin Wall was erected, Feliks lost contact with the one woman he had loved. Now at age 61, as his old life is razed to the ground, he becomes more committed to discovering if any of these people he had lost are alive, and if so, can he find them? As one facet of the past dies, so another may awaken and regenerate.

Throughout the course of the novel, Feliks, who has lived in the attic of his mind, and valued ideas over people, comes face to face with two characters, Woody and Rene DuFour, who recognize the power of emotion over intellect. Feliks' lengthy dialogues with them are too erudite and soul-baring to be realistic, but are nevertheless completely engaging and enlightening - catalysts for change for our dazed hero. Other characters also challenge Feliks - among them, landlady Sandrine Lefebvre, publisher Mr. Bergelson, and a previously unknown relative, Angelika. In the process, Feliks is forced to confront and begin to reshape his political beliefs and their role in his life:

"In the 30s and 40s, men with hatred in their soul were offering the mass delusion of fascism. Men with money in their souls were offering the temptation of mass production. Men with what I mistook for love in their souls.....were offering the mass hope of communism. It had seemed an easy choice to make. It had seemed the only correct choice. I do not think it occurred to me that perhaps none of the choices were correct."

Readers of The Breaking of Eggs might, from the start, expect Feliks to more fully reject communism and embrace capitalism, but Powell is not a simplistic thinker, and in fact is fully aware of the ambiguities and incompletions of life that may keep us from gaining closure in our thinking. Powell's portrayal of Feliks is also realistic and three-dimensional, allowing us to enter into the turbulence of his mental process and erupting emotions as he struggles for coherence.

The Breaking of Eggs is a novel of ideas, but at least as much, it is a novel of people and personal relationships, and of the process of psychological change. It is also an historical novel, introducing us to the repercussions of the fall of the Berlin Wall upon East Europeans, as well as the aftermath of WWII and the Cold War. We can read and enjoy it upon a variety of levels - plot, character, thought process, personal transformation, political theory, historical reality.

I have rarely read a novel of such intellectual and emotional depth, or one that has challenged me so deeply to examine my own life, and the stories I tell myself about who I am. If you are prepared to be challenged, or at the least awed by a truly superb reading experience, read The Breaking of Eggs. It will be a memorable experience.

There are certain books that after being read, change you as a person. Whether it's the intellectual insight or the passion of a character, which are both present in this novel. The Breaking of Eggs isn't a story to be read lightly. Felix is real and truly inspiring. Jim is a remarkable writer.

What is most extraordinary about Jim Powell's novel is not just its ambition, but the modest means through which The Breaking of Eggs covers that vast range of human experience that defines the world we live in today. It's through the simple yet contradictory character of Feliks Zhukovski that Powell finds the perfect perspective to view the modern world, consider how we have arrived there and contemplate where we are likely to go. A 61 year-old man of Polish origin living in Paris in 1991, Feliks has witnessed the seismic changes that have come about after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the fall of Soviet bloc Communism, but while the world moves on and takes it all in its stride, Feliks finds it much harder to redefine himself and his place within this new world.

Having made a modest living as a travel writer and publisher of a guide to eastern bloc countries, the changes are difficult enough to accept for a man with leftist leanings who was once a member of the Communist party, but with the sudden new interest that there now is in his guides, Feliks also has to consider an offer for them made by an imperialist capitalist business from America. Feliks however takes the opportunity of a meeting to discuss the sale in New York to look for his older half-brother Woodrow, from whom he was separated from during the war. Confronting issues that are antithetical to everything he believes in comes as something of a shock to the system, but the organisation of the trip to America brings to light several revelations about his past that force Feliks, at this late stage in his life, to re-evaluate those former fundamental certainties and ideals that have defined his existence.

Although it deals with coming to terms with the past, in many ways The Breaking of Eggs is more about the world we live in today, taking a look at the bigger picture of the impact of the Second World War and the Cold War, but doing so through small intimate stories of people who lived through the period. Considering the respective positions of life as it is lived in America, in western Europe and in the former Eastern Bloc, each of those personal human experiences is very different, but each of them have come to define who those people are and have consequently shaped the world we see around us today. The novel ambitiously takes in all these perspectives and tries to reconcile them, or at least put them into a context where the distortions of personal experience and blind belief in imperfect ideologies can be reconsidered and put in their rightful place, without diminishing their importance. It may not be possible to build a perfect society without the breaking of some eggs, but it's important that those sacrifices that have been made in flawed attempts are acknowledged and are not allowed to be shamefully hidden away.

It's a consideration of and accommodation with the past that is necessary in order to fully understand who we are now, and where we want to go. The scope of what The Breaking of Eggs covers through the experience and reawakening of Feliks then is vast and incredibly ambitious, but related with the utmost simplicity and delicacy, with genuine consideration for the personal, human experience, it puts into context the extraordinary changes that Europe and we as a people have gone through during and since the war. Through the stories of Feliks, Woody, and of their extended family and friends, it's clear that differences remain, but they are not necessarily irreconcilable if we can find a way to live with ourselves and live in the present. It a fine sentiment, and A Breaking of Eggs makes it seem more than just idealistic, but essential and possible.

How an English author who once worked as an office boy for the Beatles came up with this plot is beyond me. A 10-year old Polish boy and his older brother are sent by their mother on the eve of WWII to live with relatives in Basle. While the older brother goes off to join the resistance in France, the younger boy grows to become a Leftist travel writer based in Paris. We meet him in 1991, after Glasnost, Perestroika, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he is coming to grips with the changes in the Eastern Europe he has known and traveled through for 26 years.
It's an odd plot, but a moving book, and this is an advance copy I'll be keeping, and returning to over the years.