point of no return

Well I just read a cheery little book to warm the heart this Christmas/Hanukkah week...Martha Gellhorn's novel Point of No Return (originally published as The Wine of Astonishment, a title she, rightfully I think, hated). Why did I expect her fiction to be not that great? I thought this book was wonderful. It concerns a Jewish American WWII soldier named Jacob Levy, and how, after visiting Dachau after Germany's surrender, he becomes completely unhinged. I'm sure Gellhorn would have hated the comparison to her loathed ex-husband, but I can't help noticing some Hemingwayish sentences in the unflinching, unsentimental narrative. (And excuse me, but a scene in which a disillusioned colonel "tipped his head back to drink. Here's to nothing, he thought, here's to what we all got, nothing, nothing, nothing." Um.) But I mean this in a good way. I don't know how else one could really write, I suppose, about the horrors of war, if not in a stripped-down and bare language like this. Or maybe I don't mean that but it certainly is effective.

The book weaves in and out of the perspectives of its many characters, often resting with Levy but also dipping into the minds of the other men in his regiment and the women they encounter and sometimes a passing stranger. This refracted POV is one I like anyway (as you know if you've read my book) but it seems especially apt for the story at hand -- this world in which everyone involved has retreated into fantasy worlds in order to survive, fantasy worlds which are never shared with even the people who closest to them. In the end it's about remembering how to hope which I know sounds hopelessly cheesy, but after the journey the book takes you on, you need a little something like this or you'd go as crazy as the poor soldiers and prisoners do. Some of the characters lapse into wartime cliche but I think this is an easy sin to forgive in this case. I recommend it, if you're feeling hearty.

This is the book she'd most recently published when she and my grandmother had their little correspondence. Gellhorn had been covering the war, and had seen Dachau like Jacob Levy does, and you can understand her lack of patience for invented drama on the homefront (which is the gist of her letters) -- how she may have felt, like the soliders in the book, that no one at home could ever understand the things they hadn't seen, much less appreciate all that had been done to protect their cozy little lives.

I'm becoming a little obsessed with Gellhorn now, I realize. But, as someone said to me recently, she hasn't really had her moment of resurgence yet and maybe it's coming.