The Polyglots by William Gerhardie (Prion Books, 2011) ...

The Polyglots by William Gerhardie (Prion Books, 2011)

 

Another odd, beguiling book by this unique and interesting writer.  The Polyglots (originally published in 1925)  is set in the far east -- mostly in Japan and China during the period of the Great War and the Russian Revolution.  

Its narrator is a British military man of Belgian descent, born in Russia, who is posted rather autonomously, it seems, in the far east, where he reunites with his eccentric Aunt ? and lives with her very large, very eccentric family which includes many hanger-ons.  All these people, whether French, Belgian, British, or Russian are outcasts, waifs, people once firmly ensconced in empires or regimes that have failed or are floundering.  So they go on living as best they can on ever-diminishing resources and finances, unable, until the very last moment, to give it all up and head for home -- a home that is theirs only geopolitically, not sentimentally.

The narrator falls in love with Aunt ?'s beautiful and decorative but pathetically vacant daughter.  Their inert romance, and the family's necessary removal from Tokyo to Harbin, China via Vladivlastock, is as much of a plot of Gerhardie can muster, but the real strength and charm of this book is its gallery of eccentrically poignant characters and its wonderfully strange atmospheres -- a world that is vanishing so quickly that at times it seems already lost.

Flawed and shaggy, but a lovely book.