Customer Reviews

Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book contains two novellas. The first is a well-crafted study of how charismatic individuals spin history for personal gain, be it social/sexual or material. The fact that the Holocaust is the history being spun is timely and fascinating.

The second is a full length novel that has been unfairly savaged by previous reviewers for being formless, with "thin" characters, unattractive "pathetic" main character etc. etc. Anyone's entitled to his opinion, but I believe these reviewers missed the point. This is an existential story written from the perspective of a woman who is neurotically obsessed with her (older) lover. I think it's brilliantly done. Certainly we know lots of OTHER people who have been in such relationships. Do all romantic heroines have to be heroically self-assertive? What a depressingly narrow range of reader tastes if that is the case! Nina's musings as she flounders in the emotional vortex of her obsessive love for Leo are fascinating and generally close to the mark. Her character is 'thin' because love-obsessed persons are self-absorbed and have a constricted range of expression. That Prose "made Paris boring" is not a criticism, but high praise! The embarassingly simple point is that even the most attractive environment will be sterile and dully malevolent when filtered through the opaque lens of emotional dependency.

My Creative Writing professor recommended this book to me, and I flew right through the first of the two novellas. I think it's brilliant---it's hard enough to write about the Holocaust, but it's even harder to do it with a true sense of humor. And though the second novella isn't as strong as the first, the first is so good that I stand by the five stars I'm giving it.

I read these two novellas before I saw the other reviews here on Amazon, and its a good thing. It would have been a real shame to have been discouraged or influenced by some of the negative comments. Ms. Prose's voice is unique, her stories well structured and interesting, her characters human. I don't want to spoil these stories for anyone who has yet to read them, so I won't go into the details of the plots. This is the second book by Ms. Prose I have read (Hunters and Gatherers was first) and I am pleased to have discovered her. Paris in the winter can be a gray place, but it is still Paris. Enough said. If you enjoy well crafted, serious fiction you will enjoy these stories (how is that for a loaded sentence?)

Is there a more striking cultural critic writing literary fiction today? Are you sick of the solipsism and self-indulgence of folks like David Foster Wallace and Martin Amis? If so, these two novellas are for you. The shorter of the two, "Guided Tours of Hell," gives us a pathetic American playwright who, at a Kafka conference at German Death Camps, can't divorce his consciousness from petty rivalries. It takes guts to set a satire at the sight of one of our century's greatest tragedies, but Ms. Prose does it and to devastating, shocking success. The commercialization of the Holocaust -- most speciously seen in the film "Schindler's List" and publicity and self-congratulating that surrounded it -- is the perfect backdrop for this tale of male rage and cultural jealousy. Ms. Prose is a marvelous and graceful prose writer with a cultural critic's sharp eye and an academic's reservoir of knowledge; her writing is a pleasure, and a terror to read, as you never know what unpleasant truth you'll discover about yourself.

The title story in this book, a sixty-page novella, is a darkly comic tour-de-force. A minor Jewish-American playwright named Landau attends a Kafka conference in Prague, a seedy affair in a country barely emerging from socialist austerity. His inept reading from his play about Kafka's one-time fiancée is trumped by the anecdotes of Jiri Krakauer, a Holocaust survivor who claims to have had an affair with Kafka's sister Ottla while in the Terezin concentration camp. Jiri serves as an exuberant guide on a tour to Terezin itself, lionized by the others and reveling in it, and telling ever more fanciful stories which become increasingly Kafkaesque. When Landau timidly calls him on some detail, Jiri rounds on him. "You neurotic American guys! Writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you'd gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag!" Despite the depths of tragedy to which he bears witness, Jiri is a monster, relying on his immunity from criticism as a Holocaust survivor to pursue personal adulation. He reminds me strongly of the protagonist in Ian McEwan's recent SOLAR, who trades on his Nobel Prize and global-warming credentials in much the same way, but Francine Prose's story is more successful because more compact.

The other novella in this book, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is almost three times as long and lacks the concentration of the title story. But it revisits some of the same themes in the friendlier setting of Paris. The protagonist, Nina, works for a much older man, Leo, who edits a travel magazine selling the city to American retirees. She is much more competent and intelligent than she allows herself to be, for she has fallen in love with her boss, and lets him dictate what she does, thinks, and feels. She is "convinced that her whole life, prior to that moment, was a ripped magazine she was leafing through until her appointment with Leo." Leo sends her to Paris on her own, to an abominable hotel run by a former mistress. Nina wanders around disconsolately until she arrives unexpectedly at a private showing at the Rodin Museum, where she has a personal epiphany. "What was sleeping with Leo beside what she'd just experienced, the orgy she'd taken part in, the lustful entwining of bodies and limbs that Rodin set in motion: ecstatic, blissful, unsatisfied still, all these years after his death?"

Leo does eventually arrive, and commandeers Nina for his own agenda, a tour of all the Paris spots associated with death: Cemeteries, the Catacombs, and the Conciergerie, from which the prisoners of the Revolution were taken to the guillotine. Many of these episodes reflect moments in the first story, and Leo is another comic monster in his way. Nina will reach quieter epiphanies that may eventually restore her self-esteem, ending an amusing, thoughtful story that is full of wonderful observations along the way, but is much more difficult to bring to a single focus.

Unguided Tours of Hell is a winner. Prose's character exposition through the limited but insightful internal monologues is witty and poignant. She delivers the characters in less than ten pages and develops them in the remaining sixty. It was difficult at times for me to know whether the attraction to this book was its delectable prose or the reflection of some of my own character flaws. The sensitivity of the story's background heightens the tension built by their petty interactions. While most times I just wanted to sympathise with the characters, the truth is, I could actually empathize.

Half a step up from Danielle Steele, this soon-to-be mass market favorite (I'm sure) was an utter disappointment from the first several pages. Characters are as thin as rice paper, their conversations are trite, self-absorbed and adolescent. I expected much more of these two novellas, and the writing in them made me, on more than one occasion, want to fling the book across the room. I am aware of Ms. Prose's accolades and achievements, which makes this book that much more disappointing. Sort of a tragedy, really

"Three pigs" in particular, with characters Leo and Nina, is really pretty bad. I don't know how Prose has established such a reputation, but I know I don't want to read any more. Her lack of conceptualizing a work at the beginning, of being unable to make fiction beyond the tiresome and hideously predictable musings of these characters, really attests to mediocrity, not brilliance.

In 'Guided Tours of Hell', Prose provokes disgust at Landau and annoyance with his unreal pettiness and insecurity, somewhat interesting on its own merit. She brings up much more compelling and disturbing concepts of sensationalism and exploitation of an event like the Holocaust, which, mixed with Landau's preoccupations, make for an interesting combination. The second story was a disappointment. Any interest lingering from 'Guided Tours of Hell' disappeared once I started 'Three Pigs in Five Days'. Prose, throw us a bone! The idea of a man messing with his woman's mind is interesting for a few pages, but our heroine is too abjectly pathetic. A joyless and tiresome read.

The one star goes to the first novella which at least built toward something. The second novella is so bad and the characters are so thin, it's no wonder every thought that enters the female character's head is followed by an exclamation point! Characters address each other by first names all the time ( apet peeve of mine), as if they've got severe mental lapses and need to say the name over and over again. There's not a serious intimate thought in this book! And the way she butchered the setting! How anyone can make Paris boring is beyond me, but Kudos to Prose for doing such! Kudos!!!