Customer Reviews

Hopeful Monsters

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In 1991, Nicholas Mosley resigned from the judging panel for England's prestigious Booker Prize when none of his choices made the shortlist. Writing about the affair in The Times of London, Mosley related that all of his choices were rejected because they were 'novels of ideas, or novels in which characters were subservient to ideas.' He went on to opine, in a statement that seems to apply as much to his Whitbread Prize-winning novel 'Hopeful Monsters' as to his view of his Booker choices: 'My point was that humans were beings who did have ideas, who were often influenced by ideas, to whom ideas were important. If they were not, then there was some lack in being human.'

'Hopeful Monsters' is a novel where character development is subservient to ideas, where narrative action takes place against big historical events. While it ostensibly tells the story of a life-long romantic relationship between Max Ackerman, an English physicist, and Eleanor Anders, a German-Jewish anthropologist, the romance is as much a vehicle for the promulgation and exploration of ideas as it is a tale of a man and a woman in the twentieth century.

'Hopeful Monsters' begins at the end of World War I. Max is ten years old and lives outside Cambridge, England. His father is a biologist who specializes in genetic inheritance and his mother is a woman of seeming artistic interests who had been 'brought up on the fringes of what was even then known as the Bloomsbury Group.' His parents have had long ties to the Cambridge University community. Eleanor, too, lives in an intellectual milieu, one in which ideas predominate. Eleanor lives in Berlin, where her mother is a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemburg and her father is a lecturer in philosophy. From such beginnings, novels of ideas are made!

From this starting point, 'Hopeful Monsters' narrates the story of Max and Eleanor through the rise of Nazism in Germany, the post-Lenin rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and the development of the Atomic Bomb. It does this while, all the time, interweaving Darwinism (and its Lamarckian heresy), Marxism, quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and even suggestions of Jewish mysticism. It is a story that runs from 1918 until the 1970s and continually challenges the reader to think about the ideas, the opinions, the intellectual sensibilities and feelings of Max, Eleanor and the books other characters. It is a magnificent and challenging novel of ideas, a novel that deservedly won the Whitbread Prize in 1990.

If 'Hopeful Monsters' has any shortcomings, it is that ideas and historical events predominate at the expense of character development. It also suffers, at times, from a somewhat turgid prose style. In particular, Mosley is fond of introducing statements by Eleanor and Max with the clauses 'I said' and 'You said'. It is a construction that helps the reader follow long spoken exchanges, but gets a bit tedious. Mosley also tends to write sentences as statements with a question mark at the end. This, too, can be annoying, suggesting a rising inflection by the speaker that can hardly be the intent. These are, however, relatively minor failings in a novel which is majestic in the breadth and depth of its intellectual suggestiveness, a really big modern novel that deserves to be more widely read.

This book,one of the most remarkable books ever written, achieves the nearly-impossible feat of covering the greater part of the 20th Century through the very specific eyes of two extraordinary people as they fall in love across time and distance. Through a unique and internalized form of correspondence full of remarkable detail and expansiveness between Max (British) and Eleanor (German) we are led through their personal histories and their unique worlds, beginning in pre-WWII Europe and culminating in present-day America. Through the metaphors of physics and biology the reader is invited to look through a microscope and a telescope simultaneously, a sensation which is absolutely unbeatable.

This book was recommended to me a decade ago and I loved it then, have reread it several times and will always be moved by it.Complex, challenging and always idiosyncratic while adhering to the grand tradition of the novel of ideas it has passages so dense and stimulating you want to memorize them or read it out aloud to whoever is listening. It tells the story of two idealistic individuals who are caught up in some of the crazier movements of the 20th century and manage what is so hard to do; to adventure from each other's safety and still stay true to the idea of each other. Despite the depth of the political analysis and the complexity of the portrayed philosophies I have always thought of it as primarily a love story that is both starcrossed and redeemed. By the time the author imagines them at rest as "one of these everlastingly happy couples on an Etruskan tomb" and the cancer( of fanaticism? of loneliness?) is dying it never fails to make me happy when I'm sad or sad when I'm happy.
It reminds me of Niels Bohr who said that you recognize a profound truth by its opposite also being a profound truth.
You guessed it: highly recommended

This novel is almost a history book of the 20th century but it is also a love story between Max and Eleonor, a British physicist, and a German Jewess who becomes an anthropologist and a psychanalyst who works with Jung. The two protagonists meet when Goethe's play, Faust, is playing in Germany. Einstein, Hitler, Franco and Jung, amongst other prominent figures of the 20th century, are always present in the novel. You have to know very well the part these figures played in our history to follow the plot, and to understand the atmosphere in which the main characters evolve. There are also many pages who are made of dialogues between physicists, numerous philosophical thoughts also. You feel very "intelligent" when you read this novel, and this is not a bad feeling indeed! The Hopeful Monsters are the Human Beings, who can be so violent and cruel, but who can also make beautiful and unforgettable masterpieces, such as paintings. The end could have been written differently and it would have made it a better novel, but it is a very good novel. It has the same erudition as Umberto Eco's novels. Finally, you have to be interested in historical events to like this book, if you are not, the love story alone will not be sufficient.

In 1991, Nicholas Mosley resigned from the judging panel for Englands prestigious Booker Prize when none of his choices made the shortlist. Writing about the affair in The Times of London, Mosley related that all of his choices were rejected because they were novels of ideas, or novels in which characters were subservient to ideas. He went on to opine, in a statement that seems to apply as much to his Whitbread Prize-winning novel Hopeful Monsters as to his view of his Booker choices: My point was that humans were beings who did have ideas, who were often influenced by ideas, to whom ideas were important. If they were not, then there was some lack in being human.

Hopeful Monsters is a novel where character development is subservient to ideas, where narrative action takes place against big historical events. While it ostensibly tells the story of a life-long romantic relationship between Max Ackerman, an English physicist, and Eleanor Anders, a German-Jewish anthropologist, the romance is as much a vehicle for the promulgation and exploration of ideas as it is a tale of a man and a woman in the twentieth century.

Hopeful Monsters begins at the end of World War I. Max is ten years old and lives outside Cambridge, England. His father is a biologist who specializes in genetic inheritance and his mother is a woman of seeming artistic interests who had been brought up on the fringes of what was even then known as the Bloomsbury Group. His parents have had long ties to the Cambridge University community. Eleanor, too, lives in an intellectual milieu, one in which ideas predominate. Eleanor lives in Berlin, where her mother is a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemburg and her father is a lecturer in philosophy. From such beginnings, novels of ideas are made!

From this starting point, Hopeful Monsters narrates the story of Max and Eleanor through the rise of Nazism in Germany, the post-Lenin rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and the development of the Atomic Bomb. It does this while, all the time, interweaving Darwinism (and its Lamarckian heresy), Marxism, quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and even suggestions of Jewish mysticism. It is a story that runs from 1918 until the 1970s and continually challenges the reader to think about the ideas, the opinions, the intellectual sensibilities and feelings of Max, Eleanor and the books other characters. It is a magnificent and challenging novel of ideas, a novel that deservedly won the Whitbread Prize in 1990.

If Hopeful Monsters has any shortcomings, it is that ideas and historical events predominate at the expense of character development. It also suffers, at times, from a somewhat turgid prose style. In particular, Mosley is fond of introducing statements by Eleanor and Max with the clauses I said and You said. It is a construction that helps the reader follow long spoken exchanges, but gets a bit tedious. Mosley also tends to write sentences as statements with a question mark at the end. This, too, can be annoying, suggesting a rising inflection by the speaker that can hardly be the intent. These are, however, relatively minor failings in a novel which is majestic in the breadth and depth of its intellectual suggestiveness, a really big modern novel that deserves to be more widely read.

A wonderfully brilliant novel of ideas, especially involving physics and cosmology -- but don't let that scare you off. A romp through twentieth century (british and european) intellectual history, with plot and character. As I was reading the book, I kept wondering how Mosely would bring it all together at the end; unfortunately, he doesn't pull it off, having to result to the device of shifting narrators and points of view at the end and summarizing time instead of chronicling it. While the end doesn't spoil the book, just know that you'll be deflated somewhat at the end. That said, the prior 90 percent of the book is so incredibly worthwhile that you will not regret the experience -- to the contrary, the book is genuinely a tremendous accomplishment and is quite enjoyable. (If you like this stuff, check out Richard Powers, especially the Gold Bug Variations.)

[T]he overall pattern of their story (so they seem to have been saying) had been one of trying to learn how to deal with the patterns of the self-destructive society they were part of--how to see clearly, how to try to become not destructive themselves, and by doing this to be doing what they could for society. -Hopeful Monsters

I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to avoid the topic, but it is impossible : Nicholas Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Fascists in the 1930s, caricatured in Aldous Huxley's Point-Counter Point and elsewhere. Nicholas also happens to be a highly regarded and quite accomplished novelists, so enough about that.

It is often said by those seeking to defend James Joyce that those of us who dismiss him simply don't wish to be challenged. But Hopeful Monsters proves that a novel can challenge a reader intellectually but still provide him with an enjoyable reading experience. The story, which is actually just one part of the Catastrophe Practice series of novels, tells both the story of two lovers, Max Ackerman and Eleanor Anders, and of the 20th Century. Max is a young English physics student, who meets folks like Ludwig Wittgenstein at garden parties, Eleanor a German Jewish anthropologist, whose mother was a disciple of Rosa Luxemburg. Between them they meet many of the most influential figures of their time and contemplate nearly all of its trends and ideas, scientific, political, and philosophical.

The hopeful monsters of the title are salamanders that Max raised as a boy and which physically adapted to their environment, evolving within a generation. Mosely's hopeful suggestion is that perhaps there's a kind of Heisenberg Principle for biology as well as for physics and that by observing ourselves and becoming conscious of the need to evolve beyond our current state, we will influence the process. We will evolve to the next level because we realize the need to do so. Or at least I think that's what he's saying. I'm not really sure, but I do know that the novel is a veritable blizzard of ideas, most of them interesting, some maddeningly elusive, but all of them worth pondering.

Even with all this, Mosley never loses track of the complicated relationship between Max and Eleanor, In the final chapters of the book he brings them together for a final affecting scene and manages to tie up most of the philosophical gist of the book (I think). If you are looking for a novel that will make you think, but will keep your attention, you can't do better than this one

GRADE : A

Interplay of biology, physics, philosophy and politics. Going beyond the usual banal comparisons, the author presents the period between the world wars as a political and human investigation into uncertainty, quantum mechanics and relativity. Following 2 young people, a British boy and a German girl, the book proceeds in a series of backlooking narratives that take place in the major cockpits of the 20th century - from Berlin in the 20's to Russia and Spain in the 30's; politics plays a strong part, with Fascism and Communism playing for dominance across the continent. Through all this the characters try to find a way to create a meaningful life. Significant characters whose views permeate the book include the Lamarckian scientists Kammerer and Lysenko, Wittgenstein, Heideigger, Einstein, and many others. Never does the book bog down in didactic presentation, while still presenting a clear understanding of the major intellectual trends of the 20th century. Many other books have used this period as a background, but in this case, it's an essential element to the plot.

Great for book club discussions - you'll find no end of ways to interpret and discuss this book.

I've never been much of a history buff, but while reading this story I found myself going online to research periods of time and events that were the backdrop of the book.

And the characters' minds were very interesting. While I enjoyed the history aspect, it was the unique way in which the characters thought that made the book truly engaging.

This is an intense, complex, poetic novel about "love". Hard to put into words, but there are passages which tend to transport a person. It is truly worth the effort to try to track down a copy of this gem.