Customer Reviews

Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Humor and horror. Wise and weird. Real and surreal. You name a paradox and this book owns it. I couldn't put it down, except when I had to just stop and think about it. Then I went back for more. My opinion in context: I have worked for 5 years now in a Jewish institution. I work with Holocaust survivors, their descendants, and the American Jews who witnessed from afar. I am a WASP by birth and an atheist by intellect. This book let me understand the paranoia that intelligent Jewish professionals who have no direct connection to the Holocaust tell me that they feel, that they imagine coming, and that they almost expect. It explains--without explaining--so many things I have tried to understand. It is a ladder up into an attic in the heads of every Jew I have met--and I believe it has given me a glimmer of understanding. As an atheist, this is a tour de force of my own strange attic. What a book.

I really, really wanted to love this book. Auslander's Foreskin's Lament is one of the funniest books I've ever read--it had me laughing out loud over and over again--so I had high hopes for his first novel. But Hope: A Tragedy reads like a cross between Franz Kafka and Woody Allen, with all the worst excesses of each, and I was, unfortunately, disappointed.

I should hasten to add that I'm a huge fan of irreverence and not at all opposed to dark humor, which this book has in spades. It's just that Hope: A Tragedy is so over the top that it eventually lost me. Auslander keeps playing the same bits over and over again, and while they may have been amusing the first or second time, by the fourth or fifth, all I could do was roll my eyes.(I'm thinking specifically of his hero, Solomon's, habit of putting store-bought vegetables in his demented mother's garden patch each morning to fool her into thinking she'd grown them, as well as the incessant references to the smell accompanying the unwanted house guest camped out in the attic, and his mother's endless faux references to being a Holocaust survivor.) Although I kept reading, the book started wearing on me to the point where I just wanted to finish it and move on.

I know from Foreskin's Lament what an extraordinarily gifted writer Auslander is, and I'll look forward to his future efforts, but this one didn't work for me.

This is the most brutal depiction I have ever read of a martyr complex. If you are interested in that and how guilt is used and abused, you should *definitely* read this book.

One of the other reviewers compared this to a cross of Kafka and Woody Allen. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. This "novel" reads more like an extended fable to me.

Disclaimer: I was tempted to give this only four stars for not being funny to me, but, I think it's only fair to judge a book by what it is, rather than what I want it to be (and apparently some other people find it funny). Just don't think that this is at all like Beware of God or to a lesser extent Foreskin's Lament though there is some thematic overlap.

I was hoping this book would be as good as "Foreskin's Lament" but I was terribly disappointed. "Hope" is a boring non stop kvetchy psychosis of Kugel (the main character) who is the stereotype of a worrisome, thinks too much nerdy Jewish Man with the classic affliction of celiac disease and a god awful Mother. There is nothing appealing about this character or any character in this book. Even the 3 year old son is portrayed as a sickly screaming unattractive child. The book starts with a promising premise; that Anne Frank survived and has been hiding out in attics all this time. Kugel finds her in the attic of the home he just purchased. Anne is now an old ugly mean bag of bones who stinks up the house. Kugel, his Mother and Anne are forever having bowel movements in the wrong places. Not pleasant at all. Then some nasty throw up session is added to make the book even more disgusting then it already is. Why Kugel's wife stays as long as she does is beyond me or any reader. Take Philip Roth's character's and Woody Allen at their possible worst without any intelligence or humor and you have this book. Seriously awful.

Warning: This Novel May Split Your Sides!

This probably is the funniest novel I have ever read--and I am an old guy who has spent his life reading and reading and reading.

Okay, let me give you a taste of this book, not in my words but in Shalom Auslander's.

This from page three: Solomon Kugel was lying in bed, thinking about suffocating to death in a house fire, because he was an optimist.

When a novel begins like this, you know you are in for a wonderful romp with a really funny Jew! Yes, there actually are humorous Jews!

The Kugels are 40-year-old Solomon, his wife Bree, their young son, Jonah. Oh, yes, of course, Solomon's mother. What is a household without a old Jewish mother, right?

Okay, here's another taste, this right after Solomon sees his new-born son: Jonah was beautiful and innocent and pure, so Kugel felt terrible guilt for bringing him into this world. To father this child was a horribly selfish act, a felony, in fact--everyone here in this world is a kidnap victim from some better place, or from no place at all, and Jonah had been dragged here, by Kugel and Bree, against his will, without provocation, without consent, without any good goddamned reason whatsoever beyond their own selfish desires.

Are you laughing yet?

I will offer one more. But let me warn you that this is side-splitingly funny, page after page after page.

Mother was a hoarder.
She kept everything.
Ever since the war...she packed for the move to Kugel's new home...
Most of Kugel's boxes were filled with books. Science, philosophy, art, literature; the philosophy of science, the science of literature, the art of philosophy, the science of art, books about other books and the books about those books about other books; Gogol on Pushkin, Nabokov on Gogol, Wilson on Nabokov on Gogol. Joyce on The Odyssey, Beckett on Joyce, everyone on Beckett. Kugel had grown weary of them, ashamed of them, in fact--of the hope he had placed in them, of the answers he had sought from them--but he still couldn't bring himself to throw them away, like old medicine bottles full of remedies that never worked but that you didn't dare throw away on the off chance they would someday do what they promised, that you'd be stricken by chance with the one disease only they could cure, two weeks after they'd been pulled off the market. Kugel had taken a week's leave from work after moving in, and spent his days heaving box after box up into the attic when he would have rather thrown them allin the trash. They say you can't take it with you, but good luck trying to leave it behind.

Some people gave it away. Shame on them! I won't tell you exactly who. But Kugel finds an unwanted and uninvited guest in his farmhouse attic, a certain someone who is used to living in an attic. And a certain someone who is not dead after all, a certain someone who is well known for a certain diary she wrote. And is not a happy--or attractive--old lady, very busy writing a novel because she does not want to be known for having written just that one book and at such a young age.

reviewed on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, January 11, 2012 by Maureen Corrigan
part of the review:
In Auslander's novel, a young man named Solomon Kugel relocates his family from the city to an old farmhouse in Stockton, N.Y. Kugel wants a fresh start, and Stockton is defiantly proud of being "famous for nothing." But Kugel's attempt to escape the burdens of the past is doomed from the moment he starts tracing the source of a mysterious tapping transmitted through the heat vents of his house. Climbing to the attic, he discovers none other than a very old and very nasty Anne Frank.
Auslander, of course, also benefits from the identity politics he makes fun of: It's impossible to imagine a non-Jew writing this novel, even as it's tricky enough, as a non-Jewish critic, to review it. If I like the book, I'm insensitive; if I say it's in bad taste, I'm falling into the guiltily pious attitude toward Frank that Auslander ridicules.
Auslander has said in interviews that he wanted to write a funny book about genocide -- and he has succeeded. Whether or not you read it, however, will probably depend on whether you think some things and some people are just not funny; or, whether you think the immense consolations of art include finding laughter and ideas in some pretty grim places.

Auslander is not a writer for everyone. Foreskin's Lament was my introduction to him, and it made me expect hilarity, darkness, weirdness and magic from this intriguing author. This novel is no disapppointment. I know many reviewers were not nearly as complementary. I believe they probably did not know what to expect from this author. The tragedy of the human condition is a recurring theme here, and I think it more than delivered. From the identity of the stranger in the attic to the way townfolk responded was just priceless. The main character,
Solomon Kugel, is as irreverent and disturbed as can be. His mother is going to live forever, making things more difficult for him. She is wrapped up in the illusion that she is a holocaust survivor, and responds to everything as if she were. While nothing could be further from the truth, she is determined to live with survivor's guilt and make her son all the more miserable because of it. Kugel's obsession with death, dying and trying to decide what his last words should be is an endearing a character quirk as it is dark and upsetting. I read this book twice, and loved it even more the second time. If you are offended by dark humor, bodily functions, or just weirdness in general, this is not a book for you. However, anyone who appreciates dark humor and strange but intriguing characters will love it. I think it will surprise many readers with it's overall intelligence and insight, if they only give it the chance it deserves.

This book has the dubious honor of being even worse than the last bad book I read based on these characters. (The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, which had Peter spending more time describing his self abuse than his love for Anne) I have to give the author credit for originality in making an unsympathetic Anne, and it's funny in spots, but most of the time he's trying too hard to be funny, which is never funny.

Entertainment Weekly called it "poisonously funny" but they were only half right. It's time to let Anne rest in peace. Skip it.

There are definitely things to like about this book. The set-up is worthy of a great novel--Solomon Kugel moves his family to a rural New York town where he is not only a fish out of water but he also discovers Anne Frank living in his attic. Mr. Auslander clearly has skills as a comic writer and creates some very funny moments: Kugel's encounters with the Messerschmidts (who know about Anne in the attic) and Eve, the real estate broker, stand out, as well as Kugel's time in the workplace where he sells for EnviroSolutions, a recycling company. Kugel's search for what he wants to be his last words is a running theme through the novel that also generates some funny moments and a historical review of some famous last words.

Unfortunately, Mr. Auslander's comic skills are not enough to save Hope: A Tragedy. There are numerous problems here but the biggest is that there is not a single really likeable character in the book. Anne Frank is a foul-mouthed terror, Kugel's mother labors under the fantasy of being a Holocaust survivor, the townspeople around Kugel are all liars, cheats, and/or arsonists. His wife is understandable, at least, but hard to sympathize with since Kugel is the center of the novel.

As for Kugel himself, the reader cannot sympathize with him either. Auslander seems to want to make him sympathetic but his decision-making process is so ridiculous that he is unbelievable. Kugel wants to have hope for the future, for his family, which is admirable. His shrink, Jove (what's in a name?), constantly advises him to forget hope, forget happiness, and just get on with life. But why are having hope and getting on with life mutually exclusive? A few simple decisions--put his mother in a home, go to work on a regular basis, throw Anne out of the attic--and his problems would be under control. But he can't seem to do any of this for reasons that don't seem realistic. Auslander mines some good tragedio-comedy with Kugel putting food in his mother's garden and buying supplies for Anne, but it's not enough. If the comic effect or the ending (which is horrible) were worth the effort, it would be possible to suspend disbelief, but in a novel that has you pulling for Kugel, he ends up being a horrible disappointment.

When it comes right down to it this novel is not a disaster but it, like so many others, is a chance wasted. It feels like too many attempts to force humor by pushing characters to extremes, rather than letting humor and true tragedy arise from strong, believable characters. Mr. Auslander is a writer of obvious talents, but they don't seem to be on best display here.

Some subjects are just naturally funny and, at the top of that list is, of course, Jews remembering and/or commenting on, the Holocaust and the whole Jewish experience thereafter

We will pause now, while you think about the above statement.

You have several choices of reaction:
A) HOW DARE YOU!!!! B) Huh? C) What's a Holocaust? and D) Nobody could pull that off, but it'd be fascinating to see someone try.

If you say A, B, or C, this is probably NOT the book for you.

If, on the other hand, you say D, prepare to laugh until you cry (and cry until you laugh) at one of the most outrageous, hilarious, moving, profound, non-sensical, literary experiences of the decade.

Also, one of the few books that finally puts a famous diarist into perspective. (No, I don't mean Samuel Pepys)