William GerhardieRecensioni

Flotsam of World War I, sloshing around in the aftermath and hoping to wash up on a friendly shore. Our somewhat unreliable — at least regarding himself — narrator, a British military liaison in Harbin during the chaos of the Russian revolution, gets entangled in his ludicrous, exiled, poverty-stricken extended family, falls vapidly in love with his cousin, and tries to forget the war. I've always liked this kind of (eccentric) character-driven story, and Gerhardie's cast of eccentrics is as entertaining as they come. Dispossessed White Russians, English people who've barely set foot in England, several bona fide lunatics, children and hangers-on make for my kind of comedy. Gerhardie has a special talent for writing children, whom he makes somehow adorable yet also believable and hardly irritating at all.

Diminishing returns after my previous reads in 2008 and 2013, but I still had a good time.

both a tragedy and a comedy. It is the story of a fickle, social climber, Dinah, who was married to Jim. Dinah quickly discovered Jim had no prospects and found Walter, an up and coming composer, to serenade her about London and the English countryside; oblivious to the feelings of her husband, from which she separated. She tired of Walter in a couple of years because he took her for granted and returned to Jim, not as a husband, but a lover. Then there was Eric........Dinah finally dies and all three men mourn her in death, but could not appreciate her in life. This was at times silly and at times poignant. 324 pages½

Some fiction is disappointing and leaves you wishing the author had never intruded on your mind. But some is disappointing in a way that makes you wish you'd read a different book by the same person; The Polygots is disappointing in this more optimistic way. Gerhardie starts out strong, with a fabulously weird narrator, nice social observation, and charming comedy. Then precisely nothing happens. There are events (particularly the uncle's death), and the book has an arc (Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh arrives in Russified China, lives there for some time, goes back to England with his family) but it's hard to see any intellectual or emotional development in the characters, the narrative, or, for me at least, the reader.

Now, that's a real shame, because on a less high-falutin' level, this is an exciting novel. It's hovers somewhere between Evelyn Waugh, Tolstoy and Rene Leys. But a Waugh-length novel with little plot can't really contain a Tolstoyan cast, so many of the incidents are uninteresting. Captain GHAD's voice is by far the best part of the book: self-obsessed, ignorant, charmless, incompetent and immature, he replicates much of his second namesake's silliness, but is also quite wise in an 'out of the mouths of babes' kind of way. When he fades into the background and becomes a mere reporter of his family's discussions, the book bogs down fast.

So I'll keep an eye out for second hand Gerhardie, and recommend you do the same. Though it's disappointing, even this one is worth reading.

Gerhardie was English, but was brought up in Russia and coming of age at the time of the First World War and Russian Revolution broke out. Futility follows an haute bourgeois Russian family as their fortunes wane. The narrator one Andrei Andreich (also an Englishman of Russian upbringing) is in love with one of the three sisters of the family, Nina. The father supports not only them, but his ex-wife, her lover (a Jewish dentist), his current mistress, a Prince who has attached himself to the household and the family of his very young new "wife" (not sure he ever married her) and her entire family. Where he goes, they all go. The theme, besides the obvious one of the title, is of waiting -- the father waiting to find out if his gold mines are still his, the mistress, also waiting for her pay off after which she will go back to her native Germany, all of them waiting for things to get better.
". . . this gathering of souls dissatisfied with life, yet always waiting patiently for betterment: enduring this unsatisfactory present because they believed that this present was not really life at all: that life was somewhere in the future: that this was but a temporary and transitory stage to be spent in patient waiting. And so they waited, year in, year out, looking out for life: while life, unnoticed, had noiselessly piled up the years that they had cast away promiscuously in waiting, and stood behind them--while they still waited." There is homage to Chekhov and to Goncharov here, but something more, an attempt to capture what is alien to westerners, a fatalism and a faith both, a blindness that is both innocence and cynicism. The family move west as the country goes to pieces, the father wants to be closer to his mines and they end up in Vladisvostock. Andrei returns in the employ of the British Navy, working as a translator for an Admiral. He woos Nina, she spurns him, then draws him. Does he love her? Or an idea o of her? As the different governments and revolutions succeed one another, the family remains together, waiting, seemingly untouched by events while people around them die. It's a short book, but took me a long time to read, quite extraordinary, I think, but also so quiet and uneventful you hardly realize how much is happening, how the world around these people is changing even while they are not. Reprinted as an 'unknown classic'--it is indeed that. **** 1/2½

Brilliant. Examines the love affairs of Dinah, a beautiful young woman who seeks the best in love from three men, Walter, Jim and Eric, and then her sad decline.
Gerhardie is at his best with dialogue which is fresh and intelligent. He has a keen instinct for revealing the absurdities in our personal entanglements and their failure to go beyond our human range of experience.

Though Gerhardie's approach was certainly innovative, and though I often smiled and sometimes laughed, I can't see that he - or this novel - merits the level of praise lavished by contemporaries or more recently. The protagonist is the narrator (in autobiographical mode) and much is made by admirers of the profundity of his regular philosophical musings. I'm less convinced; they come across to me as somewhat child like meanderings (albeit in high flown language) of a self-centred know-all. I ploughed on and finished the book, but I wasn't captivated . . .

Un oficial inglés destinado al extremo de la Rusia asiática nada más terminar la I Guerra Mundial, es decir, en plena guerra civil entre bolcheviques y rusos blancos. Se reúne allí con su familia más o menos lejana (y más o menos familia), de origen belga pero con amplios períodos de residencia en Japón, dominada por la peculiar y despótica tía Teresa. A ella (a la familia) se van acoplando diversos personajes al compás de los acontecimientos, casi todos huidos del avance bolchevique. Se enamora de una prima lejana, y van pasando cosas. Y nuestro oficial a veces las narra con clásico humor inglés, y otras veces divaga o filosofa, y otras veces se pone melancólico o incluso indignado. Depende del humor del momento. No siempre el autor ha conseguido que yo siga el ritmo de sus estados espirituales. Cuando no, pues me he aburrido un poco; cuando sí, lo he pasado muy bien. Dicen que este autor y esta novela son una especie de tesoro oculto de la literatura inglesa. Yo no creo que sea para tanto. Pero, aún así, es un buen libro.½

The Polyglots is becoming a neglected book. Great comic characters in tragic straits. Gerhardie was a master at handling characters in absurd circumstances

A wonderful novel, drawing from the author's Anglo-Russian childhood. I love the way he plays with the conventions of the novel.

'One grows older furtively, under the watchful eyes of friends. But gradually one sees they are accomplices who condone the crime; which turns into a weakness, an indulgence, finally a boast.' - These are the opening lines from William Gerhardi's RESURRECTION. A thirty-seven year-old man attends a ball during the course of which he has an out-of-body experience and revisits his entire past.