History: The Home Movie [Hardcover]

Craig Raine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1994

The Pasternaks are a family of writers, printers, musicians, whose attempts to work and survive under Stalin are chronicled. The Raines are professional boxers, psychotherapists and eccentrically English. Their varying fortunes are conveyed in three-line stanzas.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This "novel in verse" from British poet Raine (Rich) traces in tercets the 20th-century history of his family in Oxford, England, and of Boris Pasternak's in Russia. The subject matter echoes that of historical fiction or family chronicles like War and Peace or Buddenbrooks, but Raine tells it in family album-sized snapshots, with the verse reminiscent of Auden and Betjeman. From this discrete, disconnected perspective, events are presented with uniform, monotonous diffidence-whether adolescent masturbation, a lecture on theosophy by Yeats or a menacing telephone call from Stalin (major events, like Pasternak's winning of the Nobel Prize, are avoided altogether). History's parallels and coincidences, including musical mothers and leg injuries in both families and variations on trials (from libel suits to Stalin's show trials), thread through chronologically arranged sections alongside recurring poetic images (for example, the moon or spiders) and literary allusions (Shakespeare in particular). Raine's unvarying poetic approach to characters and incidents, whether mundane or complex, eventually fails to amass the sustained density of a novel's narrative and mood, however, and his imagination succeeds in recreating life only in insular England, not in tragic Russia. First serial to the New Yorker; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The center of this versified novel reveals episodically the sad life of "arrogant, elegant" Boris Pasternak, his extended family, and his fellow writers. Characters who may or may not be fictional weather for almost 80 years the absurdity of uprooted contemporary life with detachment. Raine offers World War I sergeant Henry Raine, long-suffering wife Queenie, and their sons along with fastidious psychiatrist Elliot, Norman-the-boxer, and luckless Jimmy. Historical figures such as Conan Doyle, Eisenhower, Lenin, and Yeats appear and depart like marionettes, and nothing is very real-but it's splendid. With the panache of Aldous Huxley, he revitalizes Point Counter Point (1928), using Pasternak instead of D.H. Lawrence as a balancing agent to the dissipated behavior of the time. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes disgusting, the imagery mingles highbrow refinement with X-rated slang. One doesn't know if this "home movie" is satire or a roman a clef. Whichever, it is finely stylized English wit.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 326 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (September 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385476566
• ISBN-13: 978-0385476560
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars You had to be there, I guess..., December 17, 2001

By 

Daryl Anderson (Trumansburg, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History: The Home Movie (Hardcover)

This book came highly recommended to me via Tom Disch's book, "The Castle of Indolence", a wonderful compilation of commentaries on poetry. I was, and am, especially interested in the long poem as a unique form, and this "Novel in Verse" seemed worth a look.

"History: The Home Movie" intends to take an under-the-covers, yellowing underbelly view of a history which includes the intersection of the author's family and that of Boris Pasternak through the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. Rather than the grand sweep of events and armies we are offered a look through the refracted lens of personal peccadillo and hidden, twisted lives. An interesting prospect which did not carry this reader past the halfway mark.

The difficulty that I found was twofold. The reader needs to be well-versed in the details of lifestyles and events during that era in history. Raine's cryptic and rather chopped poetic language is evocative but peppered with period references that simply eluded me - in large part because of what was presumably left out to satisfy the muse. Furthermore, you need a chart to keep track of the characters and their various Russian nicknames and given names and cousins and friends. I'm not kidding ! There really is a chart; a pair of family-trees adorn the frontspiece. Perhaps they warn that the author realized at some point that the language and story themselves would not manage to support the superstructure of the characters as individuals or to define their interrelationships.

SO... you will find yourself reading a segment which takes the point of view of one whom you eventually realize is some sort of doctor who you eventually realize (if your bag of historic detail is loaded up) is doing the mummification of Lenin that left him preserved for generations of Soviets to view under glass. That time I "got it", but I plowed through many other sections thinking I would understand what was going on if only I had paid more attention to my Doestotevsky.

The end result, perhaps intended, but not satisfying, is more of an Ashbery'ish walk through shards of history which sometimes, briefly, clump into nodes of meaning or reference, but otherwise only provide a broad music. Verse, perhaps but not a novel.