The Invisible Bridge

Hm, it's been a while since I've posted. I've been reading slowly and gotten a bit behind, so let me try to catch up.

The Invisible Bridge is an historical novel by Julie Orringer that takes place before and during World War II in France and Hungary. Andras Levi is a Hungarian Jew who gets a scholarship to an architecture school in Paris in 1937. After enduring a train ride to Paris and managing to find lodging, he discovers that his scholarship has been lost. However thanks to a benefactor he secures funding and soon acquires a job at a local theater. Between dealing with his studies, his work, his friends, and anti-Semitic colleagues, he meets a woman over ten years older than him and falls in love with her. Klara is also from Hungary but is in hiding in France due to a mysterious history.

The first half of the book is the romance between Andras and Klara as they fall in love and deal with issues typical for young lovers. Andras must deal with jealousy and Klara must be able to open up to Andras after suffering loss in her past. Things are not helped by Klara teenage daughter, who becomes involved with a young American in Andras' group of friends.

The story takes a darker turn when Andras learns that as a Jew he cannot renew his visa in France and must return to Hungary where Nazi influence is growing. Klara insists on returning with him even though she would be in danger from the authorities. Andras' brother Tibor also returns from Italy with his young wife. They are dismayed to learn that not only can they not renew their visas, but they are conscripted into the military labor service, where Jews were forced to work since they were not trusted to carry firearms. Andras and Tibor suffer at the hands of cruel officers, facing starvation and cold. Yet during their suffering they take comfort from each other and their fellow conscripts. Andras and a friend from school create an underground newspaper for their unit. But when they go too far they are forced to eat the newspaper and end up in the hospital. Later, Andras watches as his friend is murdered for trying to sneak to a nearby village to trade for food.

In many ways, the war distills human nature into extremes. The harsh circumstances brings out the best and worst in the people the characters face. A cruel guard tortures Andras; a kindly doctor helps him recuperate. Some men are forced to work as mine sweepers; Andras lucks into a supervisor who wants to use his skills to help as a surveyor. But when you think that Andras has suffered terribly, he learns that a friend from Paris has suffered even worse at the hands of the Nazis. Yet this friend received great luck and kindness as was able to help Andras and his family. There are many times when they all come very close to being killed but nearly always manage to survive, yet having witnessed the torture or death of their friends and family.

The war shifts the relationships between the characters as their fortune changes. Klara's past comes back to haunt her in Budapest, and there is a feeling that fate is an unavoidable force. Her nephew Jozsef becomes jealous that his parents must make sacrifices for her. Jozsef eventually must join the labor service when bribes can no longer keep him out, and he and Andras form an uneasy alliance. The privileged Jozsef gets little sympathy from the others, and even though Andras feels a familial duty to him Andras also starts to resent his whining and self-importance.

I enjoyed reading this book. The characters grow and find an inner strength as they suffer uncertainty and a growing oppression. Andras has flashes of jealousy but discovers that his love for Klara is more important than her past. He and his family prove to be resourceful. The high and lows of the war are extremes: the joys of having a child are switched to the fear of its survival. The loss of loved ones is converted to the joy of an unexpected reunion. The emotions of the characters are put through the wringer, and we go through it with them. A-

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is one of the most dense and difficult works I've ever managed to read. The narrative is convoluted and digressive. The characters are unhinged, paranoid, and solipsistic. There is a decent overview of the plot on Wikipedia, but I will try to give my own synopsis.

The story takes place at the end of World War II. London is being bombarded by Germany's V-2 rocket. Ned Pointsman is a doctor at the "White Visitation", a sort of asylum where war intelligence work is done. Studies are done following Pavlov's work on mental conditioning and psychology. They discover that the sexual escapades of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop match precisely with the location of the rocket attacks and predate them by a few days. Thus we learn that the rocket is entwined with sex, specifically Slothrop's. And Slothrop's sex life is warped by Pavlovian experiments done on him when he was young boy. There is a steady theme of paranoia, mixed with the reality that many of Slothrop's and other's actions are controlled or directed by a mysterious Them. There's an affair between Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico. There's a dark S&M game played by Katje and Gottfried in Denmark under the direction of their master Weissman, also known as Blicero.

In part 2, peace is breaking out and Slothrop is sent to the Casino Hermann Goering where he rescues Katje from an apparent octopus attack. They sleep together and then she disappears, and he sneaks away from his watchers to go on a secret mission. In Zurich he meets a member of an Argentinean freedom group that has commandeered a German sub and takes a message for him.

Part 3 is titled "In the Zone". This is the zone inside occupied Germany where there is much activity around the rocket. A group of Africans have been brought to form a Swartzcommando. They are trying to reconstruct a copy of the V-2 rocket, the 00000. Meanwhile a Russian named Tchitcherine is looking for their leader Enzian, who is his half-brother. Slothrop gets involved with a drug dealer, gets chased by American soldiers, gets captured and released by Tchitcherine, and meets a horror movie actress named Greta. Greta leads him to the Anubis, a sort of pleasure ship traveling on a German river. There he witnesses and takes part in an orgy. After getting washed overboard he wanders around a lot and enjoys his alter ego as the Rocketman.

In Part 4 Slothrop's narrative dissolves as the 00000 is reconstructed by Blicero and Enzian. The story is filled with various digressions such as Japanese kamikazes and sentient lightbulds. In the end the rocket is assembled with Blicero's sex slave Gottfried inside and fired towards England.

The exposition above can barely scratch the surface of the happenings in this book. There are many flashbacks and sub-plots. The themes revolve around paranoia, free will versus fate, and sex as power. The travels of Slothrop are told not in a traditional narrative but as a very imaginative, wandering stream-of-consciousness flow. At times we are not sure what is real and what is imaginary. Though the characters seem paranoid, eventually true conspiracies are revealed.

A few things stick in my memory: that the V-2 rocket strikes without warning since it travels faster than sound, and that has an affect on the psychology of those in London. That Slothrop's fate is tied to the rocket through Jamf's experiments on him, the man who created the rocket's plastic component Imipolex G. Slothrop loses his focus in Germany and doesn't really understand why he's there. The Swartzcommando in Germany is a kind of dark force of power that Tchitcherine is drawn to but that he wants to destroy. Slothrop's sexual escapades culminate on the Anubis with the orgy and Greta's daughter Bianca, who later dies. That Greta and Bianca are somehow linked to a rocket scientist named Pokler who gets visitations from a girl who may be his daughter or a series of impostors. That the sexual depravity in the White Visitation is mirrored by Blicero's at the cottage in Denmark, and it is Blicero who sends his "son" to be sacrificed on the rocket.

It is difficult to judge this book. At times it was enjoyable and occasionally funny. A lot of the time it was confusing. The novel's title refers to the trajectory of the rocket as it flies through the atmosphere and finally lands on its target. Certainly the rocket and its fate influence the story's arc, and engineering and mathematics are throughout the book. I think a good work of literature should be enjoyable with or without extra explanation, but this book is so complex that it is difficult to really appreciate it without extended footnotes. At the same time, I know there is good stuff there. I will give a B. I am glad to have gotten through it. Some long books are exciting and you don't want them to end, or you have mixed feelings about the end because you will enjoy it but it will all be over. This is not one of those books. It was a marathon read. I was exhausted after reading it.