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Our Assessment:
B : small but not minor; an interesting glimpse of the Soviet Union at that time See our review for fuller assessment.
From the Reviews: - Return to top of the page - The complete review's Review:
In 1986 Chingiz Aitmatov invited some fifteen intellectuals and artists for the first Issyk-Kul Forum, in then-still-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.
The participants included Peter Ustinov, James Baldwin, Alvin Toffler, Yaşar Kemal, Arthur Miller -- and newly minted Nobel laureate Claude Simon; the group was famously also invited for an audience with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
[See also The New York Times' report from back then, Peter Ustinov talks of Gorbachev chat, as well as Arthur Miller's report from Issyk-Kul: A Conversation With Gorbachev.]
searching, then pulling a small notebook from his pocket, tearing out a page, scribbling quickly with a pencil, then, impassive, his dry, gaunt, inexpressive expression, sliding the sheet across the tablecloth brushing his neighbor's elbow (the neighbor drawn out of his somnolescence, shifting stiffly in his chair, looking down, able to read, on the small rectangle of paper, the words: "They find us contemptible") ...The locales color much of the narrative, from the Central Asian city they meet in, with its main-square statue of "the fiery bronze rider [...] who had given his own name to the city like the rustling and snapping of a flag" (Frunze, as the city of Bishkek was then still known as), to the grand theater: "where emperors and empresses had certainly been seated", as had: "the man with the bandit mustache, with the paternal smile of a bandit, with the philosophy and the morals of a murderer" (i.e. Stalin) to banquet halls. Appropriately, the closing scene is at the mausoleum: "where under the rows of marble plaques reposed, lying parallel, the embalmed mummies of the former rabble-rousers with professors' foreheads" lie. The story closes the book on them -- the final words are: "their lips now and from now on closed" --, as Simon can already write off the failed nation which he witnesses in its final decline. (Already by the time this English translation came out, in 1991, the system and nation had completely collapsed -- making for an interesting contrast with how it must have read when it first came out in French, just a few years earlier.) The Invitation isn't simply an outsider's glancing view of the disintegration of a totalitarian system, as Simon's limited but sharp impressions clearly lay bare a nation that, even with a leader who is the second most powerful man on earth, is crumbling. The group of foreigners -- almost somnambulic, much of the time, except for the bombastic Ustinov-figure -- can never be but out of place, The Invitation much like many novels -- only more extreme, and to the point in its sharp portrait -- featuring such a group of intellectuals thrown into and led about such a different world. As well-meaning as the reasons for their being brought here and the gathering are, there is hardly place for these to be in any way adequately addressed; various levels of pomp and circumstance dominate instead. Simon's often long sentences magnify the sense of pent-up compression; The Invitation is a short novel, but also bursting in its impressions (and, also, its acridity). It's far from the usual travelogue or fictionalized writers-/intellectuals-gathering account; a smaller work, it isn't slight; indeed, it feels like Simon has compressed all his exasperation and fury, at system and also (this travel and group) experience, into this short work. The Invitation is a curious little work, but certainly of some interest -- not least in the context of Simon's own life and work -- and a neat little picture of the Soviet Union at a point where its terminal decline has become self-evident. - M.A.Orthofer, 20 January 2022 - Return to top of the page - The Invitation:
- Return to top of the page - French author Claude Simon (1913-2005) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985. - Return to top of the page -
© 2022 the complete review
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