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Memoir from Antproof Case
An old American who lives in Brazil is writing his memoirs. An English teacher at the naval academy, he is married to a woman young enough to be his daughter and has a little son whom he loves. He sits in a mountain garden in Niterói, overlooking the ocean.
As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee.
Mark Helprin combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy in this "memoir" of a man whose life reads like the song of the twentieth century.
As he reminisces and writes, placing the pages carefully in his antproof case, we learn that he was a World War II ace who was shot down twice, an investment banker who met with popes and presidents, and a man who was never not in love. He was the thief of the century, a murderer, and a protector of the innocent. And all his life he waged a valiant, losing, one-man battle against the world’s most insidious enslaver: coffee.
Mark Helprin combines adventure, satire, flights of transcendence, and high comedy in this "memoir" of a man whose life reads like the song of the twentieth century.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
220 people are currently reading
1561 people want to read
About the author
Mark Helprin
44Ìýbooks1,619ÌýfollowersMark Helprin belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend. As many have observed and as Time Magazine has phrased it, “He lights his own way.â€� His three collections of short stories (A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Ellis Island and Other Stories, and The Pacific and Other Stories), six novels (Refiner's Fire, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka and, In Sunlight and In Shadow), and three children's books (Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows, all illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg), speak eloquently for themselves and are remarkable throughout for the sustained beauty and power of their language.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 230 reviews
October 28, 2018
Abandoned eighty pages from the end. I just couldn't take any more of the wilful absurdity of this book. Mt least favourite aspect of the other Helprin novels I've read is his sense of comedy. I just don't find it funny. This novel is entirely comic so more fool me for buying it!
A worrying discovery was the narrator of this novel and the narrator of his new novel appear like the same man. As if we're getting a peep into Helprin himself. Both are waging war on the modern world, both are obsessed with beautiful women who they spiritualise under a delusion that they are more sensitive to women than most men and both are control freaks. In my experience the most exhausting kind of man can often be one who, on the one hand, prides himself on how sensitive he is to women and on the other is a control freak. Sooner or later his "generous" ideas about women will reveal themselves to be just another facet of his closed and regimented mind. Contradict this kind of man at your peril. Our hero in this book wages war on coffee. I wasn't sure at times if Helprin was joking. Maybe he really does think coffee is the source of many of the problems of modern life. The satiric purpose of this phobia wasn't at all clear to me. I'm all for principles but I'm not sure I'm keen on individuals who make a relentless song and dance of them. So his hero was obnoxious to me. Again, I'm not sure this is how I was meant to feel about him. He reminded me of Osmond in Portrait of a Lady except James was fully conscious of how pernicious and noxious his character and his attitude towards women were. Helprin, you feel, doesn't share James' insights. He seems convinced his men are waving some kind of celebratory banner for the female sex - as long as they're under twenty-five, have long slim legs and are stunningly beautiful. Thinking about it, all the women in his books are fairy story females. I can't think of one who would offer an actress a challenging role in a film adaptation.
Helprin can write well but this to me was like a third rate pastiche of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
A worrying discovery was the narrator of this novel and the narrator of his new novel appear like the same man. As if we're getting a peep into Helprin himself. Both are waging war on the modern world, both are obsessed with beautiful women who they spiritualise under a delusion that they are more sensitive to women than most men and both are control freaks. In my experience the most exhausting kind of man can often be one who, on the one hand, prides himself on how sensitive he is to women and on the other is a control freak. Sooner or later his "generous" ideas about women will reveal themselves to be just another facet of his closed and regimented mind. Contradict this kind of man at your peril. Our hero in this book wages war on coffee. I wasn't sure at times if Helprin was joking. Maybe he really does think coffee is the source of many of the problems of modern life. The satiric purpose of this phobia wasn't at all clear to me. I'm all for principles but I'm not sure I'm keen on individuals who make a relentless song and dance of them. So his hero was obnoxious to me. Again, I'm not sure this is how I was meant to feel about him. He reminded me of Osmond in Portrait of a Lady except James was fully conscious of how pernicious and noxious his character and his attitude towards women were. Helprin, you feel, doesn't share James' insights. He seems convinced his men are waving some kind of celebratory banner for the female sex - as long as they're under twenty-five, have long slim legs and are stunningly beautiful. Thinking about it, all the women in his books are fairy story females. I can't think of one who would offer an actress a challenging role in a film adaptation.
Helprin can write well but this to me was like a third rate pastiche of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
December 13, 2007
I've read this book three times in the past ten years. It's my very favorite book, and it's taken me four months to plan my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ ode.
Do you remember the way you got to know someone you really love? He told you scattered stories from across his lifetime. You saw quirks and good nature. Over time, you put together themes and obscure connections. More and more stories gave deeper and deeper meaning, and you understood. As much as we can ever understand each other. Mark Helprin creates this experience, and it's hard to believe that something that takes so much time and subtlety in real life can be put to paper. Layers and layers of tragedy, comedy, art, and love, over and over.
Helprin's Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War are waltzes of gorgeous crenelated language, and of images like those you've seen during the luckiest private moments of your life. In Memoir he breaks into a tango, and sneaks out the back door for a laugh. It's just as beautiful, and proof of his versatile artistry.
Do you remember the way you got to know someone you really love? He told you scattered stories from across his lifetime. You saw quirks and good nature. Over time, you put together themes and obscure connections. More and more stories gave deeper and deeper meaning, and you understood. As much as we can ever understand each other. Mark Helprin creates this experience, and it's hard to believe that something that takes so much time and subtlety in real life can be put to paper. Layers and layers of tragedy, comedy, art, and love, over and over.
Helprin's Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War are waltzes of gorgeous crenelated language, and of images like those you've seen during the luckiest private moments of your life. In Memoir he breaks into a tango, and sneaks out the back door for a laugh. It's just as beautiful, and proof of his versatile artistry.
May 19, 2015
Okay. I will pay to watch certain actors eat soup, and I'll read anything a few writers' grocery lists. Helprin is one of them.
This book is one of my lifetime top five. This quote is the reason why:
"Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success and strength,one loves one’s parents and one’s children despite their failing and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure, not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, that love can overcome death and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith.
Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart. With it, your heart, though broken,will be full, and you will stay in the fight unto the very last."
I give this quote to my children, nieces and nephews, close friends offspring at their 18th birthday. It's not St. Paul's epistles or Shakespeare. It may be better than either.
This book is one of my lifetime top five. This quote is the reason why:
"Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success and strength,one loves one’s parents and one’s children despite their failing and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure, not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, that love can overcome death and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith.
Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart. With it, your heart, though broken,will be full, and you will stay in the fight unto the very last."
I give this quote to my children, nieces and nephews, close friends offspring at their 18th birthday. It's not St. Paul's epistles or Shakespeare. It may be better than either.
November 23, 2024
Mark Helprin is a rollicking, funny, gloriously literary writer.
The book is a massive, sprawling—in no explicable chronological order—fictional memoir. And it's all fine because it works. The chapter when the protagonist, a rabid coffee hater, a man whose life pulses with "daring and faith," goes on a rampage to save his marriage to a coffee drinker made me laugh myself almost sick.
It is not consistently funny, but that's fine too: for me, it was consistently wonderful.
What's so wonderful?
The writing, the point of view, Helprin's imagination, the writing! Helprin notices things in his idiosyncratic way—the history of ironwork on a building and how that makes the protagonist feel, which brought me to tears; the musicality of an explosive emotional reaction at the end of a conversation which he describes as a "cadenza;" the incomparable beauty of a 12-year-old disabled girl that left me in love. Or this:
And his literary prowess made me eat up every word of extended descriptions that in less capable hands would have lost energy, derailing the forward movement of the story.
Often, maybe for a whole chapter, he goes on technical tangents (for instance, flying fighter planes or doing complicated engineering), but I didn't mind that I didn't understand anything and just went with it like music.
Thanks to Alan for reviewing this book. I've read one other Helprin book (Freddy and Fredericka long before Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ) and this one made me want to read a lot more.
And thanks to Mark Helprin. I read about him and learned that he grew up in Ossining, the town that neighbored mine, was just a few years older than me, and one scene in this book was so much like a kid I grew up with that I contacted a childhood friend and now he's reading this book and we both wonder if Helprin knew the boy in our class who had no respect for let alone fear of teachers. Helprin used so much from the environment I grew up in that I could visualize many of the scenes from firsthand experience, which was so much fun.
The book is a massive, sprawling—in no explicable chronological order—fictional memoir. And it's all fine because it works. The chapter when the protagonist, a rabid coffee hater, a man whose life pulses with "daring and faith," goes on a rampage to save his marriage to a coffee drinker made me laugh myself almost sick.
It is not consistently funny, but that's fine too: for me, it was consistently wonderful.
What's so wonderful?
The writing, the point of view, Helprin's imagination, the writing! Helprin notices things in his idiosyncratic way—the history of ironwork on a building and how that makes the protagonist feel, which brought me to tears; the musicality of an explosive emotional reaction at the end of a conversation which he describes as a "cadenza;" the incomparable beauty of a 12-year-old disabled girl that left me in love. Or this:
When you kiss someone with real love it is as if this is the last thing you will ever do, after which you will disappear into infinite darkness. So that may be why you hold your breath imperceptibly, or perhaps even longer, and it is why when I remember simple things from my childhood I inhale slightly with satisfaction, close my eyes for an instant, and feel a smile so subtle it probably cannot be seen. (403)
And his literary prowess made me eat up every word of extended descriptions that in less capable hands would have lost energy, derailing the forward movement of the story.
Often, maybe for a whole chapter, he goes on technical tangents (for instance, flying fighter planes or doing complicated engineering), but I didn't mind that I didn't understand anything and just went with it like music.
Thanks to Alan for reviewing this book. I've read one other Helprin book (Freddy and Fredericka long before Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ) and this one made me want to read a lot more.
And thanks to Mark Helprin. I read about him and learned that he grew up in Ossining, the town that neighbored mine, was just a few years older than me, and one scene in this book was so much like a kid I grew up with that I contacted a childhood friend and now he's reading this book and we both wonder if Helprin knew the boy in our class who had no respect for let alone fear of teachers. Helprin used so much from the environment I grew up in that I could visualize many of the scenes from firsthand experience, which was so much fun.
February 15, 2012
Read this author. Helprin knows how to speak for those of us who love language. He loves language as much as you do, and is an expert craftsman with it. His descriptions—flying a war plane, love and loss—are so real that you are certain he has experienced them personally. There's just enough humor and bizarreness—the protagonist’s deep abhorrence of coffee; his boss and weird occupation in the cellars of the bank—to make the story genuine (because life is often bizarre) and truly enjoyable.
The sequence of this particular book is as fascinating as the story itself. The protagonist describes writing memoirs as fishing, putting in your hook and seeing what you reel in, and as you read, this makes perfect sense. Rather than chronologically follow the life of the unnamed protagonist, the story presents various events that are on the protagonist's mind at the time. Then, as you read, you realize that Helprin has carefully and purposefully crafted this tale: he starts with the man at his present old age and progresses to the man's childhood. The events you’re given at the beginning of the story give a deeper meaning to the protagonist's youth. You feel you know him, that you understand why he acts and thinks the way he does, even if you don’t fully agree with him (which he doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t, except for the coffee). You then return to the early chapters of the novel to remember everything and complete your picture of this man. You have that amazing, almost uncanny ability to be able to see the protagonist as a child at the end, and yet think back nostalgically to the man he became as presented at the beginning of the novel.
Take the time to enjoy a well-done, involving story and read Mark Helprin.
The sequence of this particular book is as fascinating as the story itself. The protagonist describes writing memoirs as fishing, putting in your hook and seeing what you reel in, and as you read, this makes perfect sense. Rather than chronologically follow the life of the unnamed protagonist, the story presents various events that are on the protagonist's mind at the time. Then, as you read, you realize that Helprin has carefully and purposefully crafted this tale: he starts with the man at his present old age and progresses to the man's childhood. The events you’re given at the beginning of the story give a deeper meaning to the protagonist's youth. You feel you know him, that you understand why he acts and thinks the way he does, even if you don’t fully agree with him (which he doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t, except for the coffee). You then return to the early chapters of the novel to remember everything and complete your picture of this man. You have that amazing, almost uncanny ability to be able to see the protagonist as a child at the end, and yet think back nostalgically to the man he became as presented at the beginning of the novel.
Take the time to enjoy a well-done, involving story and read Mark Helprin.
July 15, 2017
...the world is somewhat like a piece of paper: it can be folded only a fixed number of times, and then it refuses further adjustment.
A gentleman with a strict aversion to coffee writes a memoir and keeps it in an antproof case (which happens to be the last surviving case in the world). His life has been an amazing adventure, from orphan to WWII air ace to husband of a billionairess to gold bullion robber to South American pensioner. The hinge of the story appears to be his intense hatred of the coffee bean and all that it has enslaved. He believes caffeine to be a sin of the highest order and the drinking of coffee to be the battering ram of the soul. Handmaiden of evil!
Now this character is not easy to like. He comes across as a know-it-all and talks too much, easy in his arrogance. But the last 100 pages brings forth a hidden depth to the man and makes everything worthwhile. He falls into the world of the elite and yet has little respect for those one percenters.
...there are two kinds of creatures in the jungle: the tiger and the iguana. The tiger sets the fees, the iguana pays them.
As an iguana, I started rooting for him to despoil those who run the show. In a way, author Mark Helprin uses the 80-year memoir writer to take us through the entire 20th century as we see an America (and world) evolving from the values-based rural life to the no-holds-barred urban world. Think how Starbucks has come to dominate people's lives and you get a taste of what Helprin foresaw when he wrote this in 1995.
Half the time that we imagine things are changing for the better they are actually changing for the worse.
I am not a big fiction reader but Mark Helprin has long been one of my treasured authors because of . That book made me view NYC differently and this book almost does the same. Here, it's the 1900s Hudson Valley followed by the rambunctious Manhattan-ville. And he always does wonderful things with words. Dogs chasing a rabbit, for instance, get excited and start slobbering.
Dog saliva flew in the air. The droplets sparkled in the intense light and then were vacuumed up by the night. It was like the Trevi fountain in a high wind.
The only reason I don't give this five stars is because I didn't really love the main character. But the words, oh the words.
Book Season = Summer (iguana power)
November 21, 2024
One of the strangest novels I've ever read but not one I will likely forget nor totally understand. Is this a faux memoir? A satire? A complete lie? I'm not sure and it took me a couple of chapters to figure out how to read. Trust me just go with the flow and forget about expectations. It can be hilariously funny, exasperating but in the end it was well worth it.
I’m reading this for the second time (Thank you Book Club), and about 20% in and I just added another star to my review!!!
I’m reading this for the second time (Thank you Book Club), and about 20% in and I just added another star to my review!!!
March 26, 2018
This is another book that's been sitting unread for years on my shelf. It's a hardcover, more than 500 pages thick, its book jacket illustrated to look like the case of the title bound in twine. Every time my hand hesitated over it while selecting something to read, the large, refined serif letters drawled Literature with a self-important L, and I sighed and moved on.
But I tackled it this time, and found it neither as heavy handed nor as culturally snotty as I feared. I'd forgotten that Mark Helprin (not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the sexually harassing television journalist) has written two other titles I thoroughly enjoyed,ÌýWinter's TaleÌýandÌýA Soldier of the Great War.
Memoir...Ìýis aÌýkind of asynchronous mystery: who is the memoirist, and how did he come to the situation in which he finds himself at its start? The answers fall out languorously across a narrative that encompasses much of the 20th century, skipping back and forth in time as the writer relates the events of his life in the order most personally meaningful. Our narrator is a gentleman of means and diverse abilities, who has never accepted the conventions of society when such conventions contradict his own sense of truth and beauty. Most notably, he has a pathological hatred of coffee, a fact that is rarely central to the events he relates but nonetheless stitches the disconnected sheaves of the story into a kind of cohesion.
Helprin's language is evocative, rich and maybe a little bit self-indulgent: "I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic." But for most of the book it works, both as poetic prose, and as a defining characteristic of the narrator. My only complaint, in fact, is when Helprin indulged in a bit of absurdism about 2/3 of the way through. Out of place and out of character, it fractured the lyrical spell I'd been under until then.
Even so, it redeems itself in the end and does as real memoirs often try but fail to do: it draws a satisfying arc to a close, with the mystery resolved and the memories of the scenes along the way free to be savored.
But I tackled it this time, and found it neither as heavy handed nor as culturally snotty as I feared. I'd forgotten that Mark Helprin (not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the sexually harassing television journalist) has written two other titles I thoroughly enjoyed,ÌýWinter's TaleÌýandÌýA Soldier of the Great War.
Memoir...Ìýis aÌýkind of asynchronous mystery: who is the memoirist, and how did he come to the situation in which he finds himself at its start? The answers fall out languorously across a narrative that encompasses much of the 20th century, skipping back and forth in time as the writer relates the events of his life in the order most personally meaningful. Our narrator is a gentleman of means and diverse abilities, who has never accepted the conventions of society when such conventions contradict his own sense of truth and beauty. Most notably, he has a pathological hatred of coffee, a fact that is rarely central to the events he relates but nonetheless stitches the disconnected sheaves of the story into a kind of cohesion.
Helprin's language is evocative, rich and maybe a little bit self-indulgent: "I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic." But for most of the book it works, both as poetic prose, and as a defining characteristic of the narrator. My only complaint, in fact, is when Helprin indulged in a bit of absurdism about 2/3 of the way through. Out of place and out of character, it fractured the lyrical spell I'd been under until then.
Even so, it redeems itself in the end and does as real memoirs often try but fail to do: it draws a satisfying arc to a close, with the mystery resolved and the memories of the scenes along the way free to be savored.
February 17, 2012
I usually love Helprin, but I just couldn't get into this one after about 80 pages. I think it's hard to identify with a narrator who lives an especially large and self-focused life. This narrator reminds me of the one in *Love in the Time of Cholera* -- he finds himself so unique, so special, that ordinary rules of life do not apply. He's brilliant, accomplished, sensitive, and quirky, and we should love him for all that though he has no love for "us" -- the rest of the world out here. He wants us to feel privileged to be able to read about his exploits.
Ultimately, a character so far out of the norm of humanity is difficult to get interested in.
Ultimately, a character so far out of the norm of humanity is difficult to get interested in.
April 29, 2024
Eighty year-old man, now living in Brazil recounts stories from his life, including growing up in a Swiss mental institute, being a fighter pilot in WWII, marrying a billionaire heiress, being a bank executive, robbing same bank, and more, all driven by his intense hatred of coffee.
January 27, 2009
A very funny, but bittersweet tale, encyclopedic in scope, that veers from magical realism to farce.
April 17, 2025
I tried years ago to read this. Didn't happen. Thought I'd try again - so very, very bored. Too many good books out there to read; no longer wasting my time on this one.
February 23, 2014
The first thing that you have to know about Mark Helprin is that he combines the genre of historical fiction with the genre of fantasy. His novels are based on solid historical settings, but they are not exactly realistic, and Helprin intended them this way. His novel "A Winter's Tale", which was recently made into a movie, is very much this way. It is not realistic at all. "Memoir from an Antproof Case" is a bit more realistic, but it's still a fantasy. It should be read that way. Reading Helprin's novels purely as historical fiction will lead to disappointment.
"Memoir" is the story of an elderly American who was born at the beginning of the 20th Century and relates the story of his life through the 1980s. The main character is very quirky. He hates coffee with a passion. He works interesting jobs, becomes an aviator during World War II when he is already in his 40s, and eventually flees the country with a planeload of gold from Wall Street. What's up with this guy? As Helprin tells his tale, the reader begins to understand why this character is so quirky. Why does he hate his employer so much? Why does he hate coffee? By the end of the novel all of this becomes clear, and I really felt like I could sympathize with a guy whom I had previously thought of as a nutcase. The twists and turns in this novel and the historical anomalies kept my attention.
I would almost classify "Memoir" as a psychological novel because of the way that Helprin unfolds his characters. I also appreciated Helprin's historical allusions regarding the various eras of the 20th century, allusions that may go over the heads of less historically aware readers. Overall I really enjoyed "Memoir". I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a quirky historical or fantasy novel.
"Memoir" is the story of an elderly American who was born at the beginning of the 20th Century and relates the story of his life through the 1980s. The main character is very quirky. He hates coffee with a passion. He works interesting jobs, becomes an aviator during World War II when he is already in his 40s, and eventually flees the country with a planeload of gold from Wall Street. What's up with this guy? As Helprin tells his tale, the reader begins to understand why this character is so quirky. Why does he hate his employer so much? Why does he hate coffee? By the end of the novel all of this becomes clear, and I really felt like I could sympathize with a guy whom I had previously thought of as a nutcase. The twists and turns in this novel and the historical anomalies kept my attention.
I would almost classify "Memoir" as a psychological novel because of the way that Helprin unfolds his characters. I also appreciated Helprin's historical allusions regarding the various eras of the 20th century, allusions that may go over the heads of less historically aware readers. Overall I really enjoyed "Memoir". I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a quirky historical or fantasy novel.
July 14, 2008
This book was gifted to me by a friend's father, and though it's taken me more than a year to finally get around to reading it, I deeply appreciate the gesture.
The protagonist is so funny, honest, and imminently quotable that I almost had to break out post-it bookmarks so I could keep track of all the great lines.
This book was hovering between a good and great throughout the book, but I think the final sections are very strong and bring the rest of it together in a profound way. Helprin finally explaining what exactly an antproof case is and imparting the knowledge of the Finest School were deeply moving sections.
The narrator's dedication to the past, the world he knew, is a theme I've always identified with and admired in characters and people for that matter. He's happy but tragically so. Exile is another one of my favorite themes. His past literally has become a foreign country. Like Mowbray in Richard II, his native tongue of 50 years is suddenly useless, yet he can close his eyes and be back in 1914 on the banks of the Hudson, in a plane over the Mediterranean or Berlin, or on his way to Brooklyn fighting a sniper alongside a Swede.
The memoir is a gift to Funio, as his "father" says near the end, not so much a tome of life lessons, but an example of one life. And it's an amazing life, one anyone would be certain to pick up some pointers from along the way.
The protagonist is so funny, honest, and imminently quotable that I almost had to break out post-it bookmarks so I could keep track of all the great lines.
This book was hovering between a good and great throughout the book, but I think the final sections are very strong and bring the rest of it together in a profound way. Helprin finally explaining what exactly an antproof case is and imparting the knowledge of the Finest School were deeply moving sections.
The narrator's dedication to the past, the world he knew, is a theme I've always identified with and admired in characters and people for that matter. He's happy but tragically so. Exile is another one of my favorite themes. His past literally has become a foreign country. Like Mowbray in Richard II, his native tongue of 50 years is suddenly useless, yet he can close his eyes and be back in 1914 on the banks of the Hudson, in a plane over the Mediterranean or Berlin, or on his way to Brooklyn fighting a sniper alongside a Swede.
The memoir is a gift to Funio, as his "father" says near the end, not so much a tome of life lessons, but an example of one life. And it's an amazing life, one anyone would be certain to pick up some pointers from along the way.
November 30, 2024
"I have always thought of the year 1900 as the nozzle of a big pastry bag that unfurls icing when you squeeze it, and that for almost a hundred years the curl of civilization has been unraveling in discord" (33).
"How can you know history? You can only imagine it. Anchor though you may be in fact and document, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must be subject to the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but God to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A 'definitive' history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past, but in casting it according to his own lights, in *defining* it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstruction. Short of htat, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled" (40).
"From my position in the garden, in a fume of early light, I cannot understand the notion of banality. So many people spend so much time protecting themselves from the ordinary and the worn that it seems as if half the world runs on a defensive principle that robs it of the tested and the true. But if the truth is common, must it be rejected? If the ordinary is beautiful, must it be scorned? They needn't be, and are not, by those who are free enough to see anew. The human soul itself is quite ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are the best. They last into time as inviolably as the light" (73).
"Shortly after the White Mountains incident, Stillman and Chase remodeled the executive floors in such a way that the windows would no longer open. I was astonished. Fresh air is elemental. If you doubt me, try holding your breath for two minutes. How could anyone deliberately shut out the air? Buildings with windows that don't open may be economical but they are also insane" (110-111).
"'When you get older, your brain chemistry changes,' I told them, 'and you become wise. One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning'" (152).
"Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes you must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. But you must do it responsibly, you must not injure the innocent. Then, at least before they catch you, it works.
I know that this is true, and the reason it is true, I believe, is that the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God" (273).
"As soon as I was associated with her immense wealth, success gravitated to me like cat hair. Investment bankers dream in billions, and everyone wanted to sit with me at lunch or in the boardroom. I was rapidly headed toward the inner circle that, more and more did the thinking for Mr. Edgar and would emerge after the storm of his death with its hairy hands full of blood and money� (279).
� I had had wonderful ideas all my life� the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail� but I have never been able to translate them into reality. Smedjebakken, however, knew nothing other than the translation of ideas into reality"(337).
"The first time I stood in the presence of what today would be $150 billion, I felt a rapacious, electricity, and I thought to myself, this is here, I can touch it. I can pick it up� I can steal it. The site of the gold made Smedjebskken work like Pushkin at Bino or handle in his great two weeks. Money means nothing and brings not happiness, but it can be translated so quickly into such interesting things� cashmere coats, Dusenberg‘s, levitation, perfectly white and straight teeth, English, shotguns, ski chalets, flowers, clothes, and contentment of sorts for needy orphans, chocolate bars, tutors in Japanese, surfing in Australia, string quartets, Cedar Groves, first editions, smoked salmon, single shells. I could go on and on, but these are just some of the things I like" (362).
“We went back to the familiar, and then came the schemes� a resort, a clock factory, cutting ice, boarding horses. Perhaps some might have worked, but none was tried: he didn’t think he had enough time left to start over, and anyway he wasn’t the kind of man to do so. Like me, he understood the futility of success, and he had no heart for playing games� (399).
� half the time that we imagine things are changing for the better they are actually changing for the worse. The glory of accomplishment is misunderstood by later generations merely because of the ugly progress of quantities. For example, Lindberg‘s flight was truly great. One man, straightforward, and unafraid, did what had never been done, we’re richly funded syndicate with multi engine planes, and much greater power had failed and prevaricated. With a single engine, a small but brilliantly, conceived plane, and no fear, he did what they could only plan. It was not so much that he flew the Atlantic, but that he flew it alone.
And now he is nearly as forgotten as, day after day, the Concorde makes the crossing in a few hours, as it’s passenger sit in silence, facing their champagne and caviar. Is it not better to be Lindberg, suffering sleeplessly through the dark nights over the Atlantic, then a tycoon and a silk tie, traveling faster than the speed of sound and not giving it a thought?
The world leaves behind unseen, that which is great and that which it loves. New loves are born, and then they two are left behind. In this overspeed and cowardly rush, devotion has no place, consistency, no value, love, no other reward than forgetfulness. I don’t like it. Apparently, only one aunt proof case is left, and I have it, but unfortunately, it is not large enough to hold everything in my heart� (506).
"How can you know history? You can only imagine it. Anchor though you may be in fact and document, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must be subject to the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but God to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A 'definitive' history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past, but in casting it according to his own lights, in *defining* it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstruction. Short of htat, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled" (40).
"From my position in the garden, in a fume of early light, I cannot understand the notion of banality. So many people spend so much time protecting themselves from the ordinary and the worn that it seems as if half the world runs on a defensive principle that robs it of the tested and the true. But if the truth is common, must it be rejected? If the ordinary is beautiful, must it be scorned? They needn't be, and are not, by those who are free enough to see anew. The human soul itself is quite ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are the best. They last into time as inviolably as the light" (73).
"Shortly after the White Mountains incident, Stillman and Chase remodeled the executive floors in such a way that the windows would no longer open. I was astonished. Fresh air is elemental. If you doubt me, try holding your breath for two minutes. How could anyone deliberately shut out the air? Buildings with windows that don't open may be economical but they are also insane" (110-111).
"'When you get older, your brain chemistry changes,' I told them, 'and you become wise. One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning'" (152).
"Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes you must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. But you must do it responsibly, you must not injure the innocent. Then, at least before they catch you, it works.
I know that this is true, and the reason it is true, I believe, is that the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God" (273).
"As soon as I was associated with her immense wealth, success gravitated to me like cat hair. Investment bankers dream in billions, and everyone wanted to sit with me at lunch or in the boardroom. I was rapidly headed toward the inner circle that, more and more did the thinking for Mr. Edgar and would emerge after the storm of his death with its hairy hands full of blood and money� (279).
� I had had wonderful ideas all my life� the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail� but I have never been able to translate them into reality. Smedjebakken, however, knew nothing other than the translation of ideas into reality"(337).
"The first time I stood in the presence of what today would be $150 billion, I felt a rapacious, electricity, and I thought to myself, this is here, I can touch it. I can pick it up� I can steal it. The site of the gold made Smedjebskken work like Pushkin at Bino or handle in his great two weeks. Money means nothing and brings not happiness, but it can be translated so quickly into such interesting things� cashmere coats, Dusenberg‘s, levitation, perfectly white and straight teeth, English, shotguns, ski chalets, flowers, clothes, and contentment of sorts for needy orphans, chocolate bars, tutors in Japanese, surfing in Australia, string quartets, Cedar Groves, first editions, smoked salmon, single shells. I could go on and on, but these are just some of the things I like" (362).
“We went back to the familiar, and then came the schemes� a resort, a clock factory, cutting ice, boarding horses. Perhaps some might have worked, but none was tried: he didn’t think he had enough time left to start over, and anyway he wasn’t the kind of man to do so. Like me, he understood the futility of success, and he had no heart for playing games� (399).
� half the time that we imagine things are changing for the better they are actually changing for the worse. The glory of accomplishment is misunderstood by later generations merely because of the ugly progress of quantities. For example, Lindberg‘s flight was truly great. One man, straightforward, and unafraid, did what had never been done, we’re richly funded syndicate with multi engine planes, and much greater power had failed and prevaricated. With a single engine, a small but brilliantly, conceived plane, and no fear, he did what they could only plan. It was not so much that he flew the Atlantic, but that he flew it alone.
And now he is nearly as forgotten as, day after day, the Concorde makes the crossing in a few hours, as it’s passenger sit in silence, facing their champagne and caviar. Is it not better to be Lindberg, suffering sleeplessly through the dark nights over the Atlantic, then a tycoon and a silk tie, traveling faster than the speed of sound and not giving it a thought?
The world leaves behind unseen, that which is great and that which it loves. New loves are born, and then they two are left behind. In this overspeed and cowardly rush, devotion has no place, consistency, no value, love, no other reward than forgetfulness. I don’t like it. Apparently, only one aunt proof case is left, and I have it, but unfortunately, it is not large enough to hold everything in my heart� (506).
August 30, 2011
A sprawling catch-all tale. (Helprin's brain must be teeming with odds and ends - I was continually amazed by his skill and imagination.) This was a kitchen sink picaresque if I've ever seen one. I was irritated a few times by the trampoline timeline - where are we now? was the question that came up for a lot of the first half of the book. It evened out a bit from then on (or I got used to it - I'm not sure which), but the flexible plotline is obviously necessary to the tale, and is not affectation. Here is an old man recalling his life, and we all know how we jump around in time when we reminisce. This book has it all - a little of the tall tale, unreliable narrator, adventure, heartache, mystery - I could go on. I am definitely in for more Mark Helprin.
"Have you ever wondered what kind of life someone would lead if, after wanting more than anything to die, he were to live for seventy or more years?" Mark Helprin
"Have you ever wondered what kind of life someone would lead if, after wanting more than anything to die, he were to live for seventy or more years?" Mark Helprin
February 2, 2010
At first I was extremely annoyed by the narrator. he was trying too hard to be outrageous and a "character". Where was the narrative voice of the lovely and stately "Soldier of a Great War" that I read in 1998? But it was the last book I had with me on my trip to Kerala and i couldn't find anything other than God of Small THings in the Kerala bookstore that wasn't a risk. So I stuck with it and it grew on me. It was a good book to read on vacation - so many different things happened in it that you could read a block, put it down and move on, then come back and read another block. By the end I really enjoyed it and the narrator. But I'm giving it three stars because it annoyed the crap out of me at the beginning and I like to drink coffee.
April 10, 2025
What a pleasure, to get to read this book as I drifted off to sleep each night, my eyes slowly closing, my mind wandering off, carried by the turbulent eddies of this story into my own fantastical dreams.
I tend to compare books to dreams a lot (or at least I think I do) and I am starting to wonder if that is actually a characteristic of the particular books I read, me struggling to describe topics and themes that go over my head, or maybe just a natural product of me reading myself to sleep every night.
I am going to try my hardest (starting NOW) to not compare this book to a dream, because that's not really how it felt. It was so sharp. From beginning to end this book was laden with a poignant and absurd, laugh-out-loud wit very reminiscent of authors like Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut which, given that my favourite book of all time is Catch 22, makes it no surprise to me that I also loved Memoir from an Antproof Case. This book stands slightly apart from the works of those two masters of wry satire*, in part because it didn't feel quite like a satire. Most of the absurdity in this book comes from the actions of the protagonist (and narrator) himself --- a man who is driven by something he describes as a universal tempo, or internal metronome, but what seemed to me to be better described as "the utmost extremes of love and rage" --- and not from the world around him**. In his post hoc view of his fantastically absurd life, everything seems logical: His choice to wear scuba gear in the office? Well, he likes fresh air and the windows don't open. The world is presented as a round hole, but by the end you are more sure that the narrator is a square peg.
I laughed out loud. I thought "wow that's dark". I wondered at the purpose of my own life. I pondered mortality, morality. I looked up if smoked turkey anus was a real food... There is something for everyone in here, laid out in absolutely beautiful prose by Helprin. I highly recommend this book.
Here are a couple of some memorable lines/sections, as I wrap up my review:
*Maybe there are more than two. idk. hmu if you have recommendations.
I tend to compare books to dreams a lot (or at least I think I do) and I am starting to wonder if that is actually a characteristic of the particular books I read, me struggling to describe topics and themes that go over my head, or maybe just a natural product of me reading myself to sleep every night.
I am going to try my hardest (starting NOW) to not compare this book to a dream, because that's not really how it felt. It was so sharp. From beginning to end this book was laden with a poignant and absurd, laugh-out-loud wit very reminiscent of authors like Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut which, given that my favourite book of all time is Catch 22, makes it no surprise to me that I also loved Memoir from an Antproof Case. This book stands slightly apart from the works of those two masters of wry satire*, in part because it didn't feel quite like a satire. Most of the absurdity in this book comes from the actions of the protagonist (and narrator) himself --- a man who is driven by something he describes as a universal tempo, or internal metronome, but what seemed to me to be better described as "the utmost extremes of love and rage" --- and not from the world around him**. In his post hoc view of his fantastically absurd life, everything seems logical: His choice to wear scuba gear in the office? Well, he likes fresh air and the windows don't open. The world is presented as a round hole, but by the end you are more sure that the narrator is a square peg.
I laughed out loud. I thought "wow that's dark". I wondered at the purpose of my own life. I pondered mortality, morality. I looked up if smoked turkey anus was a real food... There is something for everyone in here, laid out in absolutely beautiful prose by Helprin. I highly recommend this book.
Here are a couple of some memorable lines/sections, as I wrap up my review:
*Maybe there are more than two. idk. hmu if you have recommendations.
February 16, 2013
It took me a while to read this one, as I kept focusing on history and period stuff, but it is a really good novel. If it was written by someone else I may have given it five stars, but it suffers by comparison to Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War. To paraphrase Jeff Vandermeer's comments on Gene Wolfe having written Fifth Head of Cerberus and The Book of the New Sun (to which I would add Soldier of the Mist), relatively early in his career, it must be galling to have later works that are very good constantly compared with such early masterworks. Even though those books are better, that speaks well of them, not ill of this one.
April 3, 2021
Oddly enough, I think this was one of the better cohesive stories I've read in a helprin novel.
As I think about it, I do lament that while Helprin is so brilliant at getting to the core of essential humanity and what drives us and captures us and moves us � while he can capture a man's humanity and his individuality simultaneously and beautifully � he has an issue with seeing women less as part of humanity and as individuals and more as constrained to that category, of mysterious "woman." Hmm. Maybe I should write a paper about it.
As I think about it, I do lament that while Helprin is so brilliant at getting to the core of essential humanity and what drives us and captures us and moves us � while he can capture a man's humanity and his individuality simultaneously and beautifully � he has an issue with seeing women less as part of humanity and as individuals and more as constrained to that category, of mysterious "woman." Hmm. Maybe I should write a paper about it.
July 23, 2007
This is a seriously overlooked book in American Literature - and will hopefully earn its place someday on the "must read" list for high school seniors or something. Okay, its a TOME, but so rewarding. Funny and magical and a gorgeous read. HOWEVER, after falling for this book, I went out an immediately tried to read everything else that Helprin has written and was pretty disappointed. I think this is his one brilliance.
June 15, 2016
Every Mark Helprin novel may not be perfect, but so far I can't prove otherwise.
I read this as part of my recovery-weekend from my first full semester of grad school, mostly in Center City Philadelphia drinking coffee (ironic, I know) in the rain, in a super-hipster coffee shop where everyone wears the same shoes and no one laughs, except me, crazily in the corner at this book. I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.
I read this as part of my recovery-weekend from my first full semester of grad school, mostly in Center City Philadelphia drinking coffee (ironic, I know) in the rain, in a super-hipster coffee shop where everyone wears the same shoes and no one laughs, except me, crazily in the corner at this book. I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.
October 8, 2018
I finished reading this "memoir" a few months ago and moved in the meantime so my comments will be as scattered as the book. The narrator told his story in fragments filled with what might have been fantasies allowing the author to flex his linguistic talents. I never felt a connection with the narrator, but I did grow more and more interested in his life without actually believing much of it which is a tribute to the author's skill. It was funny, wild, and filled with morsels of wisdom.
December 15, 2024
A good re-read. I'd forgotten enough about it that some of it felt new. Lots of absurdity along the way, then suddenly heartbreaking. Then a hard drive to the end. Helprin revisits the "justice/revenge plot" theme in later books, but I think this one is still the best.
January 13, 2010
I really liked Helprin's Winter Tale. Antproof Case is just as wonderful, if not more so. No more coffee!
November 8, 2021
I loved this book. Wrote about it here:
December 11, 2020
Helprin is a joy to read, and this is a story that dorsnt let go.
November 25, 2016
� Oscar Progresso/narrator with no name (1)
� Reason he is in Brazil, fear of being found (4); teaching English to Brazilian navy officers (6)
� Hatred of coffee—a sin, “devil’s nectar,� enslaving half the world—coffee drinking sends him into a rage (8)
� Portuguese a “baby language,� unlike English “where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything� (9)
� Marlise (15), married her at 53, she 23; Funio (16)—finding out Marlise is pregnant with Funio, not his own (21)
� “If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one’s life the illusion of expectedness.� (38)
� Fourteen, attacks school teacher (42-5)
� Straight-jacket, paraded around Europe, insane asylum in Switzerland (48)
� Miss Mayevska (56), Polish Jewess in asylum, pianist, abhors crickets
� “Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.� (59) “But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.� (60)
� First meeting (61)
� Crime—“a phenomenon of opportunity,� not to avenge but to accomplish, thrill & risk, something for nothing, “for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of escape.� (63)
� “…crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable.� (63)—Has our narrator done the detestable? How would he judge himself given this statement?
� Miss Mayevska dies with her family in the Nazi concentration camps (62)—fixes her like amber in his mind
� They escape to North Pole (65-75)--parting
� Sounds of the city (85)
� 1918—first man he killed, “thoughts martial and I was continually alarmed� (91), why he killed a man, deep aversion to coffee, and “my other difficulty in adjustment has been that from the earliest age I have been congenitally unable to know my place� (92)
� Pope: “God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon Earth.� (96)
� Coffee-drinking Walloon (98), hot coffee on the train in the summer (strange in itself), tried to be polite but becomes sick and accidentally dumps coffee in his lap, kills man in self-defense (103-4)
� “The great loves of my youth—for my parents; my home; Miss Mayevska; for God Himself, undoubted, untarnished, immediate—remain.� (106)
� Stilman & Chase, no tie, naps, etc. (110-111)
� Constance (113)
� Shot down twice, over Berlin and Mediterranean (127)
� Sex: “It was the climax of many months� testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and perhaps, elsewhere.� (129)
� “Her wealth diminutized me. I was a kept man. A gigolo. A rodent.� (137)
� “I used to marvel at the recollections of old people. How is it, I wondered, that they so often combine the qualities of elegy, fluidity, and economy?…They speak in elegies because they remember the dead, they are fluid because they have forgotten the static that slows the narrative, and they must be economical simply for lack of energy.� (148)
� Coffee—will always hate it, compares the enjoyment of it to heroin addiction, Hitler invading France, perverts enjoying their perversions (153)
� Learns to be a pilot (158)
� Marlise (202), but still pines for Constance and Miss Mayevska, who he grieves for beyond measure as his “union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology�
� How he and Constance split—he did not understand her dislike of children anymore than she understood his aversion to coffee (209-211)-she repeatedly asks him where his aversion comes from and he will not tell her, becomes too enraged to do so—why does he not reveal the roots of this hatred? (213)
� “New York gave me strength. The Hudson gave me strength, being, as it was, my garden of Eden.� (219)
� Pain of divorce from Constance (236, 242)
� “I cannot talk to my wife, because she is only fifty years of age and still imagines that the body can be the fortress of happiness.� (243) “I’m old enough to remember vaudeville but I never imagined that I would marry it. When I was young I assumed I would be coupled with a woman who spoke like a poet…�
� Funio—knows he is not his son biologically, but it hardly matters—“Above all, I want this time in his life to be unburdened, for I have never seen such a beautiful thing as childhood, and perhaps if he is not stripped of it early on, as I was, he will have the strength to live his life untormented.� (245)
� Eugene B. Edgar (251), sniper he killed in self-defense (266)
� “…the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God� (273)
� Finds his ‘brother,� another man as disgusted with coffee as he is (282), Paolo Massina/Smedjebakken
� Gold vault (303)—they decide to rob it (326), (384)
� Madonna del Lago (338)
� Watoon, filthy English phrases (387)
� Pictures of parents, icons, suffused with memory and love: “As a child I would consider these photographs, convinced that I would have neither the strength and vitality of my father nor the luck of meeting a woman like my mother…And then a bolt of wonderful lightning would strike me and pleasantly ricochet as I realized that, because I was my father’s and mother’s son, I did have a chance, after all, of growing into their strengths and graces� (389)
� Loses pictures upon crash landing in Brazil
� Born 1904, begins telling about growing up in Hudson River Valley, parents, etc. (390)
� Schoolmaster makes boys eat coffee as a punishment (396-7)
� Father a farmer, watched him fail (399): “The ground gives back more or less what you put into it. It was not the ground that had changed, or the substance of what we did, or the virtues, but everything else in the world.�
� Memories like a kiss (403)
� June 5th, 1914—goes to fish from the tower (against his father’s wishes) (405)
� “What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example/� (407)
� Train stops, car with initials (415), parents killed
� �..he was interested in my story because I was just old enough to keep everything in my memory so vividly for the rest of my life that my life would never be my own, no matter how hard I struggled, no matter what I did.� (416)
� Two men jump from car, approach him ask for food, then ask him to go fetch coffee—when he comes back, most of the coffee spilled down his front, they are gone and his parents dead (420-424)
� ***“For a child whose parents are taken from him in this way, the world becomes, if not permanently broken, then at least permanently bent. If, as in my case, the actual murderers are never brought to justice, then one is condemned to live one’s life with the knowledge that they are out there; that they’ve ruined, bested, and beaten you; that they might come for you; that any man with whom you deal, anyone you meet, no matter how smiling or likeable or how good, as long as he is of a certain age, may be the devil incarnate, and that therefore you cannot trust, or believe, or confide in anyone; that your life must become a contest of endurance so that you can live to a hundred, so that you can be sure the murderers will be dead before you, something that you imagine would be your parents� fondest wish and deepest need; and that when you parents died they did so in terror, fearing that their assailants would turn on you, the child for whom they would gladly die, but for whom at the very last they could do absolutely nothing.� (404-5)***
� Figures out the initials on the train car were Eugene B. Edgar’s—the man in whose employ he has been for thirty years (435)—goes to archives to find out
� Bridge over Hudson, his parents in the way, father wouldn’t sell—kill them as an example (453-55)—“My father never would have sold out, because what was at stake was not money but love�
� Feels relaxed about his plan to kill Edgar: “I can only say, let them help and rehabilitate the murderers of their families, I will deal with the murderers of mine somewhat differently.� (455)
� Corners Edgar at home, confronts him (465), lets him know he has stolen from him—Edgar tells him “it caused me much grief…you don’t have to believe that.� A statement that gives him pause (466)
� “After that, I didn’t want to kill him. And killing a helpless person is the most horrible thing you can do. All my life I have believed that you defend the helpless, protect the innocent, love the child in the man.� (467)
� “I killed him, and in so doing I killed the part of me that was best.� (466)—Love, followed where it led: “My childhood was over, the circle was complete.�
� Flying, crash landing (482)
� � My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that’s how.� (485)
� Realizes what he has written won’t fit into his antproof case (500), goes to the shop in Rio where he bought it 30 years before, but finds they are no longer being manufactured—is told by stationer “Dah vorld vas different.� (504)
� Tells his son where he can find the gold, hidden in the riverbed (507)
� Money makes people idiots, wants Funio to become who he is before he inherits, gives him a choice (509): “Now you can claim your patrimony, or you may be like me, and quietly do without it.� (510)
� “Coffee is evil because it disrupts the internal rhythm that allows a man or a woman to understand beauty in all things. …I know this, though I have never had coffee. I know it because I have not allowed the rhythm to be altered, and I never will.� (512)
� “I have recounted it for the reason that a singer sings a song or a storyteller tells a story: once you have come to a place which you cannot return, something there is that makes you look out and back, that makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise.� (514)
� “I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one love’s one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, and sometimes, as I did, you learn early that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. Memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. …Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better man, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.� (514)
� Reason he is in Brazil, fear of being found (4); teaching English to Brazilian navy officers (6)
� Hatred of coffee—a sin, “devil’s nectar,� enslaving half the world—coffee drinking sends him into a rage (8)
� Portuguese a “baby language,� unlike English “where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything� (9)
� Marlise (15), married her at 53, she 23; Funio (16)—finding out Marlise is pregnant with Funio, not his own (21)
� “If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one’s life the illusion of expectedness.� (38)
� Fourteen, attacks school teacher (42-5)
� Straight-jacket, paraded around Europe, insane asylum in Switzerland (48)
� Miss Mayevska (56), Polish Jewess in asylum, pianist, abhors crickets
� “Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.� (59) “But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.� (60)
� First meeting (61)
� Crime—“a phenomenon of opportunity,� not to avenge but to accomplish, thrill & risk, something for nothing, “for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of escape.� (63)
� “…crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable.� (63)—Has our narrator done the detestable? How would he judge himself given this statement?
� Miss Mayevska dies with her family in the Nazi concentration camps (62)—fixes her like amber in his mind
� They escape to North Pole (65-75)--parting
� Sounds of the city (85)
� 1918—first man he killed, “thoughts martial and I was continually alarmed� (91), why he killed a man, deep aversion to coffee, and “my other difficulty in adjustment has been that from the earliest age I have been congenitally unable to know my place� (92)
� Pope: “God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon Earth.� (96)
� Coffee-drinking Walloon (98), hot coffee on the train in the summer (strange in itself), tried to be polite but becomes sick and accidentally dumps coffee in his lap, kills man in self-defense (103-4)
� “The great loves of my youth—for my parents; my home; Miss Mayevska; for God Himself, undoubted, untarnished, immediate—remain.� (106)
� Stilman & Chase, no tie, naps, etc. (110-111)
� Constance (113)
� Shot down twice, over Berlin and Mediterranean (127)
� Sex: “It was the climax of many months� testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and perhaps, elsewhere.� (129)
� “Her wealth diminutized me. I was a kept man. A gigolo. A rodent.� (137)
� “I used to marvel at the recollections of old people. How is it, I wondered, that they so often combine the qualities of elegy, fluidity, and economy?…They speak in elegies because they remember the dead, they are fluid because they have forgotten the static that slows the narrative, and they must be economical simply for lack of energy.� (148)
� Coffee—will always hate it, compares the enjoyment of it to heroin addiction, Hitler invading France, perverts enjoying their perversions (153)
� Learns to be a pilot (158)
� Marlise (202), but still pines for Constance and Miss Mayevska, who he grieves for beyond measure as his “union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology�
� How he and Constance split—he did not understand her dislike of children anymore than she understood his aversion to coffee (209-211)-she repeatedly asks him where his aversion comes from and he will not tell her, becomes too enraged to do so—why does he not reveal the roots of this hatred? (213)
� “New York gave me strength. The Hudson gave me strength, being, as it was, my garden of Eden.� (219)
� Pain of divorce from Constance (236, 242)
� “I cannot talk to my wife, because she is only fifty years of age and still imagines that the body can be the fortress of happiness.� (243) “I’m old enough to remember vaudeville but I never imagined that I would marry it. When I was young I assumed I would be coupled with a woman who spoke like a poet…�
� Funio—knows he is not his son biologically, but it hardly matters—“Above all, I want this time in his life to be unburdened, for I have never seen such a beautiful thing as childhood, and perhaps if he is not stripped of it early on, as I was, he will have the strength to live his life untormented.� (245)
� Eugene B. Edgar (251), sniper he killed in self-defense (266)
� “…the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God� (273)
� Finds his ‘brother,� another man as disgusted with coffee as he is (282), Paolo Massina/Smedjebakken
� Gold vault (303)—they decide to rob it (326), (384)
� Madonna del Lago (338)
� Watoon, filthy English phrases (387)
� Pictures of parents, icons, suffused with memory and love: “As a child I would consider these photographs, convinced that I would have neither the strength and vitality of my father nor the luck of meeting a woman like my mother…And then a bolt of wonderful lightning would strike me and pleasantly ricochet as I realized that, because I was my father’s and mother’s son, I did have a chance, after all, of growing into their strengths and graces� (389)
� Loses pictures upon crash landing in Brazil
� Born 1904, begins telling about growing up in Hudson River Valley, parents, etc. (390)
� Schoolmaster makes boys eat coffee as a punishment (396-7)
� Father a farmer, watched him fail (399): “The ground gives back more or less what you put into it. It was not the ground that had changed, or the substance of what we did, or the virtues, but everything else in the world.�
� Memories like a kiss (403)
� June 5th, 1914—goes to fish from the tower (against his father’s wishes) (405)
� “What is necessary is not so much that parents set a good example for their children but that they fail to set a bad example/� (407)
� Train stops, car with initials (415), parents killed
� �..he was interested in my story because I was just old enough to keep everything in my memory so vividly for the rest of my life that my life would never be my own, no matter how hard I struggled, no matter what I did.� (416)
� Two men jump from car, approach him ask for food, then ask him to go fetch coffee—when he comes back, most of the coffee spilled down his front, they are gone and his parents dead (420-424)
� ***“For a child whose parents are taken from him in this way, the world becomes, if not permanently broken, then at least permanently bent. If, as in my case, the actual murderers are never brought to justice, then one is condemned to live one’s life with the knowledge that they are out there; that they’ve ruined, bested, and beaten you; that they might come for you; that any man with whom you deal, anyone you meet, no matter how smiling or likeable or how good, as long as he is of a certain age, may be the devil incarnate, and that therefore you cannot trust, or believe, or confide in anyone; that your life must become a contest of endurance so that you can live to a hundred, so that you can be sure the murderers will be dead before you, something that you imagine would be your parents� fondest wish and deepest need; and that when you parents died they did so in terror, fearing that their assailants would turn on you, the child for whom they would gladly die, but for whom at the very last they could do absolutely nothing.� (404-5)***
� Figures out the initials on the train car were Eugene B. Edgar’s—the man in whose employ he has been for thirty years (435)—goes to archives to find out
� Bridge over Hudson, his parents in the way, father wouldn’t sell—kill them as an example (453-55)—“My father never would have sold out, because what was at stake was not money but love�
� Feels relaxed about his plan to kill Edgar: “I can only say, let them help and rehabilitate the murderers of their families, I will deal with the murderers of mine somewhat differently.� (455)
� Corners Edgar at home, confronts him (465), lets him know he has stolen from him—Edgar tells him “it caused me much grief…you don’t have to believe that.� A statement that gives him pause (466)
� “After that, I didn’t want to kill him. And killing a helpless person is the most horrible thing you can do. All my life I have believed that you defend the helpless, protect the innocent, love the child in the man.� (467)
� “I killed him, and in so doing I killed the part of me that was best.� (466)—Love, followed where it led: “My childhood was over, the circle was complete.�
� Flying, crash landing (482)
� � My previous life had disappeared. If I would never again see a single person who might remember what I remembered, how could I know that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing? Pieces of paper, that’s how.� (485)
� Realizes what he has written won’t fit into his antproof case (500), goes to the shop in Rio where he bought it 30 years before, but finds they are no longer being manufactured—is told by stationer “Dah vorld vas different.� (504)
� Tells his son where he can find the gold, hidden in the riverbed (507)
� Money makes people idiots, wants Funio to become who he is before he inherits, gives him a choice (509): “Now you can claim your patrimony, or you may be like me, and quietly do without it.� (510)
� “Coffee is evil because it disrupts the internal rhythm that allows a man or a woman to understand beauty in all things. …I know this, though I have never had coffee. I know it because I have not allowed the rhythm to be altered, and I never will.� (512)
� “I have recounted it for the reason that a singer sings a song or a storyteller tells a story: once you have come to a place which you cannot return, something there is that makes you look out and back, that makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise.� (514)
� “I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one love’s one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, and sometimes, as I did, you learn early that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. Memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. …Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better man, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.� (514)
May 29, 2019
I'm not sure what I can add about this book that hasn't already been said, save for how I felt about it. I mean, it's Helprin, so the writing is crisp and tight, and the story is entertaining - so there's always a sort of appreciation for how well he does things. But subtracting from this very interesting and odd story is the level of absurdity. The villains are not deep or profound. The things that bother the protagonist are banal and odd. Instead of showing a fighter pilot who fought nazis, going on to crusade against something that our culture fights against, like nazism, or post-colonial conquest, or the globalisation of the economy, or neo-liberalism (all concerns in 1995 when it was written) it seems like he has chosen something trivial and banal, to use as a sort of trick to bring him to confrontation. Instead of bullying, he focuses on coffee. Instead of nazism, he focuses on coffee. The one great drive of the protagonist, to avenge the loss of his parents, is almost a pithy coincidence, and one that seems slapped on at the end.
Don't get me wrong, the end, the culmination, the rounding of the circle of the great motivator that pushed the protagonist on his quest for justice, is satisfying. The novel as a whole, though, seems unfocused, and a shadow of 'A Soldier of the Great War', which hit all the same themes, but in a much clearer and more moving way.
In all, a good, solid novel, and deserving of a 4, but compared to his other works, something that could have been so much more.
Don't get me wrong, the end, the culmination, the rounding of the circle of the great motivator that pushed the protagonist on his quest for justice, is satisfying. The novel as a whole, though, seems unfocused, and a shadow of 'A Soldier of the Great War', which hit all the same themes, but in a much clearer and more moving way.
In all, a good, solid novel, and deserving of a 4, but compared to his other works, something that could have been so much more.
April 26, 2020
This is only the first Helprin novel that I have read, but it won’t be my last. This imagined memoir covers huge territory in terms of time and place and does so with great gusto. His characters are detailed and quirky although all the women are unbelievably beautiful. But then don’t we think anyone we fall in love with is beautiful. This novel covers murder, robbery, a meeting with a pope, being a flying ace during WWII, investment bankers, life in small towns and big cities, life both rich and poor, travels in Europe and South America. In short, this book roams everywhere the protagonist has been during his life and it covers it in great detail. There is so much detail that the author must have done a lot of research to pull it off. And then there is the coffee - the protagonist hates coffee to an unbelievable degree that it sometimes gets him in trouble. And you will be reading along, having forgotten the coffee thing for quite a few pages when there it is again. It pops up for a sentence, a paragraph or several, and sometimes for whole pages. The coffee parts sometimes made me laugh out loud and I can’t wait to enjoy my coffee fanatic friend POV on this book (he roasts his own beans, but doesn’t drink tons of the stuff). At time I was put off by all the details (as with the robbery) but oh the words, the delightful turns of phrase. This man knows how to write and seemingly does so effortlessly. For that alone I will read more of his books.
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