Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

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 Antproof Case. This book stands slightly apart from the works of those two masters of wry absurdity¹, 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:

I have always been decisive. Indeed, part of the reason my life has been as it has been is that I have looked to God rather than to man for the limits of action.

How delightful it was to walk in the light of the full moon and in the ten-degree air, from which every hint of corruption had been precipitated.

On the morning of the day it was done, I awoke in the house in Astoria knowing I would never see New York again. In some ways this was a blessing, and in some ways not. I have heard—and seen in photographs and films—that the city has lost its civility. It was always a difficult place, but its inhabitants knew to compensate for that with a rough sincerity and warmth that I left in full bloom, never imagining for a second that it would or could vanish.

On my last ride on the RR train I looked almost as lovingly at the faces and expressions of my fellow passengers as if I were staring at a photograph of times long past. They did not know that they made a photograph. They did not understand the vanishing background of their lives: the breeze that rustles the leaves in Union Square and Central Park, and the sunshine reflecting hotly from a meadow of golden windows; the valleys of rooftop water tanks; the spiderwork fire escapes; the vanishing wakes of ferries and tugs that churn across the harbor and leave drift lines of the whitest snow even in the hottest summer. They seemed so completely unaware of these monuments, markers, and memorials.

Smedjebakken didn’t like the food in the hardscrabble settlements because it was so difficult and dangerous, but I loved it. We would sit in the glow of a brazier just after sunset, sipping warm beer from brown bottles with no labels, as a man who had not shaved since the Battle of Hastings grilled what he claimed were tapir kabobs. These we had sizzling hot, drowned in a red pepper sauce that the devil had used to paint his Bentley.

With our eyes opened wide as if by laboratory grapples, sweat pouring from our bodies, and our stomachs screaming in despair, we would eat this personification of fire, guzzle warm beer, and try to deal with a bean dish for which the recipe began, “Take one bean and a thousand pounds of garlic….”

Swaying and moaning, we would almost inevitably fall off our rickety wood chairs and collapse the tables upon which lay the food with which we did battle. But I loved this, I loved it even when we spent the night screaming in agony as tiny German scientists in our stomachs repeatedly built and blew up the Hindenburg. I loved it because it was so difficult, and because things that are difficult are good.

Smedjebakken looked at it differently. After all, he was used to eating golden rusks, cloud-white milk, and perfectly sugary lingonberries. He said, “I think, I think you like this, and I think you’re crazy. I think I’m crazy for letting you pick the restaurants. Every time we eat, it’s the Second Battle of the Marne.”

“There’s only one restaurant in this town,” I told him, happily hallucinating with stomach pain. “There’s only one building”

Every night, I “chose” the restaurant, and every night it was the same. Our stomachs were like soldiers in a winter battle, and to this day I remember the struggle so clearly that it is as if time had stopped still. Even the lizards would line up just beyond the light of the fire, watching to see how we would fare. Olé!