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Of God and Salamanders
| Article
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20387 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
3,091 Words |
| Author
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Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
HOPEFUL MONSTERS
Nicholas Mosley
Elmwood Park, II.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991
551 pp., $ 21.95
The scene is a castle in the Black Forest at which students from all over Germany have assembled for a student congress. A production of a play by Bertolt Brecht is unfolding. It is confusing, raucous. Eleanor, a German psychology and philosophy student watching the production, says "At first it was difficult to know what was going on in the play; people seemed to be saying what was occurring just in the backs of their own heads. There was also the impression of vast and imponderable events elsewhere but these were nevertheless of almost no importance. I had never seen a play like this before; it was like life!"
Onstage a girl and her ex-lover begin wandering around, as if searching, always against a background of revolution of rifles and machines guns in the streets, of the storming of buildings. But they are not paying much attention to this." and in the meantime," Eleanor adds, "the other people in the play are carrying on seeing, saying just what is trapped within their own heads." The spectators, who include Nazi Youths, feel insulted by the production and begin to riot. The real-life scene begins to resemble the stage play.
It is not until some time later in the reading of Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters that it dawns on the reader that this scene in the Black Forest is actually a microcosm of the novel's motif. It is Eleanor and her friend Max, an English physics student, who com to be seen wandering and searching against a background of revolutions of rifles and machine guns, of storming and shouting in the streets. It is a symbolic that they meet for the first time there, at the castle. They recognized something of the wandering stage couple in themselves, and something of themselves in each other. Though their meting is brief they part in the tumult a permanent bond forms between them, which brings them together at crucial junctures in their lives.
In structure and style, Hopeful Monsters, winner of England's Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 1990, does not conform to the traditional novel form. It is organized as a retrospective exchange alternately between Eleanor and Max. It is the form that best lends itself to the pair's long and ongoing inquiries and meditations on the major philosophical currents, scientific discoveries, and political upheavals of the twenties
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