What do you think?
Rate this book
The Breaking of Eggs
Hardcover in very good condition. Signed and dedicated by author on title page. First edition. Spine is slightly cocked. Contents are clean and clear. AM
342 pages, Hardcover
First published July 27, 2010
25 people are currently reading
676 people want to read
About the author
Jim Powell
3 books19 followersJim Powell (born 17 May 1949 in London) is a British novelist, and is a direct descendant of the 19th-century novelist Thomas Love Peacock.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 119 reviews
March 29, 2011
An absolutely fantastic novel and one of the most consequential and significant works I have ever read.
This is a very quiet story about very important things.
I absolutely love the way Powell is dealing with his his themes. The novel depicts a character on the cusp of a major life transition, and mirroring that is the world community as it begins its ponderous, yet inevitable, shift toward world wide consumer capitalism.
What could be a simple polemic on the benefits of leftist ideology really comes off as a sensitive exploration of what it means to be a leftist in this age where it appears capitalism has won.
I'm not very far in yet, but so far I find this book very compelling and moving in a strange way. I like this Feliks person, though I'm not certain I could articulate why at this point.
It strikes me that Feliks is noted to be a person who, since the age of 17, has no family, no home, and no meaningful connections in his life. Is this the type of person that would most likely willingly gravitate towards socialism?
Lacking the community in his personal life he sub-consciously makes up for the lack in his choice of political ideology.
Being a devoted student of WWII my (negative) opinions of Stalin are largely set in stone. It totally blew me way to read that many dedicated socialists in the west revered Stalin all the way up until his death when Khrushchev denounced him and publicly admitted the depth of his appalling crimes.
To make matters worse, many western socialists still defended Stalin even after learning what a monster he was.
This a perspective that is wholly new to me. I think it is intriguing to consider the two possible analytical paths here. The first being that ideology trumps action, and that Stalin should be honored for his commitments to the socialist vision despite his purges and pogroms. The other is that which is referred to in the title, in order to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. In other words, the ends justify the means.
I've always thought that phrase was inaccurate, it seems to me a more appropriate way to phrase it would be: in order to make a chicken sandwich you have to kill a few chickens. Or in the case of Stalin, 15 or 20 million chickens.
This is a very thoughtful book. And I appreciate the fact that most Americans who read it, myself included, are mired in an inescapable din of capitalist background noise, and Powell seems keenly aware of this. By placing the communist perspective in the gentle and incredibly rational persona of Feliks he offsets the possibility of a hostile reaction.
I actually found myself moved by his argument in favor of the Berlin Wall.
The rhetoric of the novel is very sophisticated. I especially like the deft manner in which Powell supports his secondary claims. One of the claims he makes, in connection to those stated above, is that hard line communists are unfounded in their support of Stalin as an honored figure.
Powell goes through a very effective three step sequence that deconstructs why this kind of thing might occur.
Firstly, Feliks talks about a teacher he had in grade school, named Kastner, who was kind to him, and when Feliks was upset Kastner would take him on his lap and massage the backs of Feliks' thigh until he felt better. It wasn't until much later when speaking to an old classmate that Feliks discovered Kastner was apparently a homosexual.
Shortly thereafter, Feliks ponders the situation surrounding his mother and realizes his conclusion that she was a prostitute, and had therefore abandoned him in order to better ply her trade, was an erroneous conclusion based on ignorance at the time and a subsequent failure to retroactively apply the wisdom of adult experience to the past occasion.
Lastly, Feliks applies this same pattern to his lifelong adherence to socialism.
Do we have the capacity to arrive at conclusions at a given point, perhaps early in our lives, and to then allow those conclusions to carry on into the future despite evidence or deeper levels of understanding that work to dispel these conclusions?
Again, I find myself moved by Powell's aims, but also by his methods. I'm beginning to think Powell is starting to show his hand, if not as a committed capitalist, then certainly as a general opponent of socialism. But he's doing so very gently and very effectively. If only everyone could design their discourse in such a way.
To be fair, the political systems of belief under scrutiny here bear no resemblance to the actual theoretical systems as laid down by the philosophers, political scientists, and culture theorists who originally devised and refined them. The realities of Stalin's government, life behind the Berlin wall, the treatment of Poles when the Russians "liberated" Poland, none of these things have anything to do with true socialism. Neither does the caricatures of American consumer culture as seen through Feliks' eyes when he visits the U.S. reflect the true tenets of free market capitalism.
But that becomes the point, doesn't it?
It's not the systems themselves that are problematic, it seems to me that both capitalism and socialism work perfectly well within the confines of their given set of theoretical principles.
Rather, it is the components that make up the systems that fail.
The resulting failures of real world implementations of either political ideology do not reflect the strengths or weaknesses of either ideology itself, but rather it reflects the contents of the human souls who enact and actualize them.
On either side of the political fence, when communist or capitalist governments are raised up, all that ends up being created is an oligarchy: the reins of power resting in the hands of a few.
As long as the human condition is a primary component in political systems the resulting real world implementation of theoretical systems will never be pure ideological representations. Avarice, self-interest, nepotism, lusts for power and pleasure will forever be a permanent obstacle to the ideal realization of any system of government.
The problems arise when we fixate on the ideology and deny the inherent contamination the human condition injects into the system.
Fervent apologists on the left and the right often make this error.
There are no political certainties, there are only the reflections of the human soul.
This is a phenomenal book. It is easily the finest exploration into the crosscurrents of human psychology and political systems I've ever come across. Powell has written several other works of historical commentary, and I will most certainly read those as well.
This is a very quiet story about very important things.
I absolutely love the way Powell is dealing with his his themes. The novel depicts a character on the cusp of a major life transition, and mirroring that is the world community as it begins its ponderous, yet inevitable, shift toward world wide consumer capitalism.
What could be a simple polemic on the benefits of leftist ideology really comes off as a sensitive exploration of what it means to be a leftist in this age where it appears capitalism has won.
I'm not very far in yet, but so far I find this book very compelling and moving in a strange way. I like this Feliks person, though I'm not certain I could articulate why at this point.
It strikes me that Feliks is noted to be a person who, since the age of 17, has no family, no home, and no meaningful connections in his life. Is this the type of person that would most likely willingly gravitate towards socialism?
Lacking the community in his personal life he sub-consciously makes up for the lack in his choice of political ideology.
Being a devoted student of WWII my (negative) opinions of Stalin are largely set in stone. It totally blew me way to read that many dedicated socialists in the west revered Stalin all the way up until his death when Khrushchev denounced him and publicly admitted the depth of his appalling crimes.
To make matters worse, many western socialists still defended Stalin even after learning what a monster he was.
This a perspective that is wholly new to me. I think it is intriguing to consider the two possible analytical paths here. The first being that ideology trumps action, and that Stalin should be honored for his commitments to the socialist vision despite his purges and pogroms. The other is that which is referred to in the title, in order to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. In other words, the ends justify the means.
I've always thought that phrase was inaccurate, it seems to me a more appropriate way to phrase it would be: in order to make a chicken sandwich you have to kill a few chickens. Or in the case of Stalin, 15 or 20 million chickens.
This is a very thoughtful book. And I appreciate the fact that most Americans who read it, myself included, are mired in an inescapable din of capitalist background noise, and Powell seems keenly aware of this. By placing the communist perspective in the gentle and incredibly rational persona of Feliks he offsets the possibility of a hostile reaction.
I actually found myself moved by his argument in favor of the Berlin Wall.
The rhetoric of the novel is very sophisticated. I especially like the deft manner in which Powell supports his secondary claims. One of the claims he makes, in connection to those stated above, is that hard line communists are unfounded in their support of Stalin as an honored figure.
Powell goes through a very effective three step sequence that deconstructs why this kind of thing might occur.
Firstly, Feliks talks about a teacher he had in grade school, named Kastner, who was kind to him, and when Feliks was upset Kastner would take him on his lap and massage the backs of Feliks' thigh until he felt better. It wasn't until much later when speaking to an old classmate that Feliks discovered Kastner was apparently a homosexual.
Shortly thereafter, Feliks ponders the situation surrounding his mother and realizes his conclusion that she was a prostitute, and had therefore abandoned him in order to better ply her trade, was an erroneous conclusion based on ignorance at the time and a subsequent failure to retroactively apply the wisdom of adult experience to the past occasion.
Lastly, Feliks applies this same pattern to his lifelong adherence to socialism.
Do we have the capacity to arrive at conclusions at a given point, perhaps early in our lives, and to then allow those conclusions to carry on into the future despite evidence or deeper levels of understanding that work to dispel these conclusions?
Again, I find myself moved by Powell's aims, but also by his methods. I'm beginning to think Powell is starting to show his hand, if not as a committed capitalist, then certainly as a general opponent of socialism. But he's doing so very gently and very effectively. If only everyone could design their discourse in such a way.
To be fair, the political systems of belief under scrutiny here bear no resemblance to the actual theoretical systems as laid down by the philosophers, political scientists, and culture theorists who originally devised and refined them. The realities of Stalin's government, life behind the Berlin wall, the treatment of Poles when the Russians "liberated" Poland, none of these things have anything to do with true socialism. Neither does the caricatures of American consumer culture as seen through Feliks' eyes when he visits the U.S. reflect the true tenets of free market capitalism.
But that becomes the point, doesn't it?
It's not the systems themselves that are problematic, it seems to me that both capitalism and socialism work perfectly well within the confines of their given set of theoretical principles.
Rather, it is the components that make up the systems that fail.
The resulting failures of real world implementations of either political ideology do not reflect the strengths or weaknesses of either ideology itself, but rather it reflects the contents of the human souls who enact and actualize them.
On either side of the political fence, when communist or capitalist governments are raised up, all that ends up being created is an oligarchy: the reins of power resting in the hands of a few.
As long as the human condition is a primary component in political systems the resulting real world implementation of theoretical systems will never be pure ideological representations. Avarice, self-interest, nepotism, lusts for power and pleasure will forever be a permanent obstacle to the ideal realization of any system of government.
The problems arise when we fixate on the ideology and deny the inherent contamination the human condition injects into the system.
Fervent apologists on the left and the right often make this error.
There are no political certainties, there are only the reflections of the human soul.
This is a phenomenal book. It is easily the finest exploration into the crosscurrents of human psychology and political systems I've ever come across. Powell has written several other works of historical commentary, and I will most certainly read those as well.
June 11, 2012
Serviceably written. But no moments where I wanted to savor the words. At times it felt like a thinly disguised political screed. Way too many repetitive interior mullings by the principal character, Feliks. Plot was fascinating, if a bit contrived. All in all an entertaining read, but not a great one.
October 6, 2012
This book has been on the top of a stack of books I pass every day many times over the past few years. Its cover is so familiar that I almost can't separate what I thought it would be from what it turned out to be. Coincidentally, that's one of the themes of this novel as well.
Now, it's not that I wish I had gotten to this sooner; it's that I hope every other as-yet unread book on my shelves will fulfill me as well as this one. There is a lot to think about in this book.
"I think I have changed," I said.
"I think changes have happened to you," said _____.
I wondered so much about what I should have known, and when I should have known it.
I was not certain how one went about the business of embracing chaos, but perhaps predictability needed to be the first casualty of the process.
ideology/personal experience
politics/emotions
Now, it's not that I wish I had gotten to this sooner; it's that I hope every other as-yet unread book on my shelves will fulfill me as well as this one. There is a lot to think about in this book.
"I think I have changed," I said.
"I think changes have happened to you," said _____.
I wondered so much about what I should have known, and when I should have known it.
I was not certain how one went about the business of embracing chaos, but perhaps predictability needed to be the first casualty of the process.
ideology/personal experience
politics/emotions
September 20, 2022
Já não me lembro de ler um livro assim. Com uma história, que além de ser extraordinária de tão despida de fantasias, está absolutamente bem escrita e contada. Como um simples post-it de frigorífico, que de forma familiar e pacata desperta a lembrança do peso da História no alicerce as nossas vidas.
"Nos anos trinta começamos a ter notícias do que Estaline estava a fazer - os julgamento encerrados, as mortes e os desaparecimentos. Quando as pessoas diziam que era estranho construir a sociedade perfeita sobre alicerces de ossos humanos, tudo o que se obtinha eram respostas ligeiras e convencidas dos comunistas. Oh, diziam eles, não se pode fazer uma omeleta sem partir ovos. Estavam sempre a dizer coisas assim. Que insensíveis. Que desumano. Interrogo-me sobre o que eles acham agora sobre isto: um país inteiro, meio continente cheio de ovos partidos e de cascas de gente quebrada."
"Nos anos trinta começamos a ter notícias do que Estaline estava a fazer - os julgamento encerrados, as mortes e os desaparecimentos. Quando as pessoas diziam que era estranho construir a sociedade perfeita sobre alicerces de ossos humanos, tudo o que se obtinha eram respostas ligeiras e convencidas dos comunistas. Oh, diziam eles, não se pode fazer uma omeleta sem partir ovos. Estavam sempre a dizer coisas assim. Que insensíveis. Que desumano. Interrogo-me sobre o que eles acham agora sobre isto: um país inteiro, meio continente cheio de ovos partidos e de cascas de gente quebrada."
May 30, 2010
Though an intriguing and original story, I found The Breaking of Eggs lacking in depth. The characters felt two dimensional, they seemed like constructs created to carry an idea, rather than the other way around, none of them talk like real people, none of them worked for me. Why did Rene refuse the mother’s address to his supposed friend Woodrow? I sort-of understand him wanting to wound Felix (though his aversion to the man feels very badly handled, it never really rings true) but to his good friend, a man he’s supposed to love and admire…? It seems unusually cruel to the poor old lady too, his actions leave her trapped in the Eastern Bloc Rene purports to loathe.
Why does Felix like Rene? It’s stated repeatedly that he does but it’s never explained, it simply ‘is’. Felix is a man apparently dedicated to his cause, Rene is firmly, aggressively, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, he’s been working against Felix from the start, then he commits an inexplicably cruel act in denying both brothers their mother’s location, yet Felix likes him, seeks out his company. It makes NO sense.
Why didn’t his girlfriend leave a note for Felix? That, too, is never satisfactorily explained, it’s just another crudely constructed event contrived to drive the plot. The story is full of these irritating holes and by the last third of the book they were making me very irritable.
In short, it’s a good idea that just didn’t work for me as a novel.
Why does Felix like Rene? It’s stated repeatedly that he does but it’s never explained, it simply ‘is’. Felix is a man apparently dedicated to his cause, Rene is firmly, aggressively, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, he’s been working against Felix from the start, then he commits an inexplicably cruel act in denying both brothers their mother’s location, yet Felix likes him, seeks out his company. It makes NO sense.
Why didn’t his girlfriend leave a note for Felix? That, too, is never satisfactorily explained, it’s just another crudely constructed event contrived to drive the plot. The story is full of these irritating holes and by the last third of the book they were making me very irritable.
In short, it’s a good idea that just didn’t work for me as a novel.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 2, 2021
Truly excellent from start to finish! Extremely well written, gripping and very descriptive. The best book of the year so far...
July 10, 2021
"i find this strange: that one can have a close friendship with someone about whom one has deep reservations, whilst other people, whom one likes unreservedly, are not nearly such close friends."
"When Dams burst, they burst. My dam had well and truly burst. All those walls and fortifications, all those parapets, ledges and machicolations, had given way suddenly in at once. Everything I had so carefully constructed, that had kept the waters in their place for all this time, had crumbled in the water had now spread everywhere, seeping beneath the carapace into the furthest recesses of my life. No thought or feeling was spared the flood.
"I could not expect him to share my opinions, but he seemed to respect them and I detected none of the triumphalism I had feared. I suppose, if I'm honest, that I did feel a sense of moral superiority in my politics. Yet Martin was depriving me of a natural opportunity to indulge it. Yet as a conversation went on, I found myself not resenting this fact, but positively enjoying the freedom that flowed from it."
"I had not listened to angelica. Angelica had not listened to me. Our wall came down through weakness. My weakness in allowing myself to be hurt by the taunts of a fascist. Her weakness in allowing a pinch of vulnerability to sneak beneath her defenses and make her momentarily confess the wretchedness of her life. Two moments of weakness resulting in, what, a moment of strength? how could strength come about in such a way? How could that be the way you built strength? You built strength by constructing walls, not by demolishing them. Surely that is what you did."
"I began to realize that my attitudes towards my closest family rested on false foundations and had done for my whole adult life. It was the most unpleasant and disturbing realization."
"It was a mistake to have gone back. Perhaps it always is. Places are never how you remember them. Maybe they have changed, or maybe one has changed oneself, or maybe it is a trick of memory. Once image of any place is a freak convergence of how it was at a particular moment and the particular eyes through which one viewed it, modified by time and never to be repeated."
"Although the one grand hope is faded, other smaller hopes were made and they're enough for these last few weeks. I know how to eat out small morsels of Hope until they become a feast. It's possible to do that believe me. Really,it is."
"In the thirties we started getting news of what Stalin was doing... The show trials and the deaths in the disappearances. When people said it was strange to construct the perfect society on a foundation of human bones all you got was a glib self satisfied answers from the communist. Oh they said you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. How callous. How in human. I wonder how they feel about it now... A whole country, littered with broken eggs in the shells of broken people."
"The fantasy of us meeting again was a form of subversion, the only form I could manage. Stalin didn't want me to have a family. He wanted the party to be the only family. No more ties to flesh and blood. When children were persuaded to denounce their parents that was Stalin's triumph. When I thought of you, yearned for you, prayed for you, that was my triumph. I was one egg that wouldn't be broken."
"I had this fantastic sense of expectation, and also this feeling of depression."
"For my whole adult life I had subscribed to an ideology that advocated change, radical change, as the solution to society's problems. Yet I did not welcome change in my own life. I resisted it."
"It was the striving for an illusory perfection that repelled me."
"The theme park purported to recreate the world of America's frontiersmen and women of cowboys and Indians of wide Open spaces. There was nothing real about it. I had spent much of my life visiting the tourist attractions of Eastern Europe and commenting on them for my readers. Their history was not reinvented. They are history was what happened not what someone imagined had happened, or hoped it happened, or thought would be more commercially appealing if it had happened. I did not know exactly what the wild west had been like of course accepted not been like this. Many people had died. Acres of land had been spoiled. Cultures and communities had been destroyed. That had been the reality. I noticed the proprietors were generously donating one cent out of every dollar to a foundation that ran rehabilitation programs for native americans. I presume this meant that 99 cents were going into the pockets of the descendants of those who had made the rehabilitation necessary in the first place. There were rides and sideshows and spectacles that could only have been a grotesque parity of the actual historical events, located an area where, as far as I knew, they had never taken place anyway."
"And I wondered where it was that reality stopped an illusion took over. Auschwitz was real. No doubt about that. The wild west extravaganza was an illusion. Some things hovered somewhere between the two, not a travesty of reality but hardly an authentic representation of it either. Time had something to do with it of course. But the truth should not gradually become variable, or amenable to slander, the further back in time it lay. Get it did. As the years went by, the slide into illusion began the start of the process whereby a commercial considerations compromised historical accuracy.
it seemed fundamental, this issue, because it had so much to do with what I disliked about america. This habit of seeing the world precisely as he wanted to see it, of bending the facts until they suited a particular explanation. The malleability of the truth. The contempt that greeted any opposing view."
"I hated america. I hated it's determination to export that culture, to impose it on people's around the world, the trampling of other cultures. I hated the greed that drove the culture, the materialism that fueled it. I hated the indifference to social values, the premium placed on success at all costs, the deification of self-interest. I hated the arrogance of america, it's insistence on the superiority of its values, the absence of doubt.
Yet I was not all together lying when I told you four that I did not hate america. By that I mean I was aware that my loathing was visceral and emotional but not all together informed irrational. I had never been to america. I did not expect to like what I found... But if I'm honest I did not like what I saw an Eastern Europe through the 1970s and 80s..... The more I saw of life in those countries is the years went by the harder I found it to reconcile what I saw with the ideals that had inspired the founding of those societies. I could see that the societies were functional and that they worked but I saw a little happiness in people's lives and too much fear. If anything these uncomfortable conclusions intensified my dislike of America and that was irrational too. Perhaps I resented the existence of another standard a material standard admittedly, by which progress could be judged. Had contemporary Western capitalism that existed, the material progress of communist societies would have been judged against the past alone and that was a more favorable comparison.
Yet part of me recognized that the image I held of America was no more than a cartoon, a crude caricature that suited what I wanted to believe, that might be based on a reality but did not represent a subtle or balanced representation of it."
"I grew up in an age of a mass movements. Perhaps we are all influenced too much by the times in which we are raised. All I could see were a glomerations in a massments and it was a question only of which one to choose and you chose the one that most opposed the ones you did not wish to choose. And the 30s and 40s, men with hatred in their souls were offering the mass delusion of fascism. Men with money in their souls were offering the temptation of mass production and consumption. Men with what I missed for love in their souls, with what in many cases I'm a stroke for souls at all, we're offering the mass hope of communism. It had seemed an easy choice to make and the only choice. I do not think it occurred to me that perhaps none of the choices were correct.."
"They say that blood is thicker than water, but it occurs to me that there are two types of blood. There is the blood of family and the blood of warfare, and I would not care to say which is the thicker."
"sometimes you have to be selective about the past. Things happen to all of us that should not happen, that we wish that had not happened. We have to put these things behind us, not pretend they had not happened, but not to dwell on them either, and to make a new life and meet new people and get on with it. There were fault lines in the cloth that each of us had woven, places where the warp and the weft of Life had become disjointed. If you revisited those places there was always a danger that everything you had subsequently woven would unravel."
"There's the history of great events, the march of scientific progress, the clash of ideologies, wars and disasters. Then there is history as it has lived by millions of people, across Europe and across the world. The history of births and demuing infants, of innocent childhood and surly adolescence, of loss and innocence, of love and it's slow evaporation, of toils and wages, of marriage and family, of death. And none of the grand events, however stupendous, destroys the chronicle of individual lives for those that survive them. All that remains is the changing and changeless cycle of time.
The history of great events is radical and revolutionary. It rips jagged lines to the fabric of our seamless world. And then the history of little things reasserts itself. Rhythms and cycles of Life resumed, conservative and cautious, the history of mothers and of the continuum, the seams to set our wheel, diligently stitching the jagged tears, making the fabric whole again.
perhaps there is a third history also, The real History: the croupier of time that takes these two other histories, that rolls them together like two dice in a cup and watches with neutral and insouciance as the tides of great events wash capriciously on the vessels of individual lives. And which of us feels lucky today? Faites vos jeux. "
"When Dams burst, they burst. My dam had well and truly burst. All those walls and fortifications, all those parapets, ledges and machicolations, had given way suddenly in at once. Everything I had so carefully constructed, that had kept the waters in their place for all this time, had crumbled in the water had now spread everywhere, seeping beneath the carapace into the furthest recesses of my life. No thought or feeling was spared the flood.
"I could not expect him to share my opinions, but he seemed to respect them and I detected none of the triumphalism I had feared. I suppose, if I'm honest, that I did feel a sense of moral superiority in my politics. Yet Martin was depriving me of a natural opportunity to indulge it. Yet as a conversation went on, I found myself not resenting this fact, but positively enjoying the freedom that flowed from it."
"I had not listened to angelica. Angelica had not listened to me. Our wall came down through weakness. My weakness in allowing myself to be hurt by the taunts of a fascist. Her weakness in allowing a pinch of vulnerability to sneak beneath her defenses and make her momentarily confess the wretchedness of her life. Two moments of weakness resulting in, what, a moment of strength? how could strength come about in such a way? How could that be the way you built strength? You built strength by constructing walls, not by demolishing them. Surely that is what you did."
"I began to realize that my attitudes towards my closest family rested on false foundations and had done for my whole adult life. It was the most unpleasant and disturbing realization."
"It was a mistake to have gone back. Perhaps it always is. Places are never how you remember them. Maybe they have changed, or maybe one has changed oneself, or maybe it is a trick of memory. Once image of any place is a freak convergence of how it was at a particular moment and the particular eyes through which one viewed it, modified by time and never to be repeated."
"Although the one grand hope is faded, other smaller hopes were made and they're enough for these last few weeks. I know how to eat out small morsels of Hope until they become a feast. It's possible to do that believe me. Really,it is."
"In the thirties we started getting news of what Stalin was doing... The show trials and the deaths in the disappearances. When people said it was strange to construct the perfect society on a foundation of human bones all you got was a glib self satisfied answers from the communist. Oh they said you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. How callous. How in human. I wonder how they feel about it now... A whole country, littered with broken eggs in the shells of broken people."
"The fantasy of us meeting again was a form of subversion, the only form I could manage. Stalin didn't want me to have a family. He wanted the party to be the only family. No more ties to flesh and blood. When children were persuaded to denounce their parents that was Stalin's triumph. When I thought of you, yearned for you, prayed for you, that was my triumph. I was one egg that wouldn't be broken."
"I had this fantastic sense of expectation, and also this feeling of depression."
"For my whole adult life I had subscribed to an ideology that advocated change, radical change, as the solution to society's problems. Yet I did not welcome change in my own life. I resisted it."
"It was the striving for an illusory perfection that repelled me."
"The theme park purported to recreate the world of America's frontiersmen and women of cowboys and Indians of wide Open spaces. There was nothing real about it. I had spent much of my life visiting the tourist attractions of Eastern Europe and commenting on them for my readers. Their history was not reinvented. They are history was what happened not what someone imagined had happened, or hoped it happened, or thought would be more commercially appealing if it had happened. I did not know exactly what the wild west had been like of course accepted not been like this. Many people had died. Acres of land had been spoiled. Cultures and communities had been destroyed. That had been the reality. I noticed the proprietors were generously donating one cent out of every dollar to a foundation that ran rehabilitation programs for native americans. I presume this meant that 99 cents were going into the pockets of the descendants of those who had made the rehabilitation necessary in the first place. There were rides and sideshows and spectacles that could only have been a grotesque parity of the actual historical events, located an area where, as far as I knew, they had never taken place anyway."
"And I wondered where it was that reality stopped an illusion took over. Auschwitz was real. No doubt about that. The wild west extravaganza was an illusion. Some things hovered somewhere between the two, not a travesty of reality but hardly an authentic representation of it either. Time had something to do with it of course. But the truth should not gradually become variable, or amenable to slander, the further back in time it lay. Get it did. As the years went by, the slide into illusion began the start of the process whereby a commercial considerations compromised historical accuracy.
it seemed fundamental, this issue, because it had so much to do with what I disliked about america. This habit of seeing the world precisely as he wanted to see it, of bending the facts until they suited a particular explanation. The malleability of the truth. The contempt that greeted any opposing view."
"I hated america. I hated it's determination to export that culture, to impose it on people's around the world, the trampling of other cultures. I hated the greed that drove the culture, the materialism that fueled it. I hated the indifference to social values, the premium placed on success at all costs, the deification of self-interest. I hated the arrogance of america, it's insistence on the superiority of its values, the absence of doubt.
Yet I was not all together lying when I told you four that I did not hate america. By that I mean I was aware that my loathing was visceral and emotional but not all together informed irrational. I had never been to america. I did not expect to like what I found... But if I'm honest I did not like what I saw an Eastern Europe through the 1970s and 80s..... The more I saw of life in those countries is the years went by the harder I found it to reconcile what I saw with the ideals that had inspired the founding of those societies. I could see that the societies were functional and that they worked but I saw a little happiness in people's lives and too much fear. If anything these uncomfortable conclusions intensified my dislike of America and that was irrational too. Perhaps I resented the existence of another standard a material standard admittedly, by which progress could be judged. Had contemporary Western capitalism that existed, the material progress of communist societies would have been judged against the past alone and that was a more favorable comparison.
Yet part of me recognized that the image I held of America was no more than a cartoon, a crude caricature that suited what I wanted to believe, that might be based on a reality but did not represent a subtle or balanced representation of it."
"I grew up in an age of a mass movements. Perhaps we are all influenced too much by the times in which we are raised. All I could see were a glomerations in a massments and it was a question only of which one to choose and you chose the one that most opposed the ones you did not wish to choose. And the 30s and 40s, men with hatred in their souls were offering the mass delusion of fascism. Men with money in their souls were offering the temptation of mass production and consumption. Men with what I missed for love in their souls, with what in many cases I'm a stroke for souls at all, we're offering the mass hope of communism. It had seemed an easy choice to make and the only choice. I do not think it occurred to me that perhaps none of the choices were correct.."
"They say that blood is thicker than water, but it occurs to me that there are two types of blood. There is the blood of family and the blood of warfare, and I would not care to say which is the thicker."
"sometimes you have to be selective about the past. Things happen to all of us that should not happen, that we wish that had not happened. We have to put these things behind us, not pretend they had not happened, but not to dwell on them either, and to make a new life and meet new people and get on with it. There were fault lines in the cloth that each of us had woven, places where the warp and the weft of Life had become disjointed. If you revisited those places there was always a danger that everything you had subsequently woven would unravel."
"There's the history of great events, the march of scientific progress, the clash of ideologies, wars and disasters. Then there is history as it has lived by millions of people, across Europe and across the world. The history of births and demuing infants, of innocent childhood and surly adolescence, of loss and innocence, of love and it's slow evaporation, of toils and wages, of marriage and family, of death. And none of the grand events, however stupendous, destroys the chronicle of individual lives for those that survive them. All that remains is the changing and changeless cycle of time.
The history of great events is radical and revolutionary. It rips jagged lines to the fabric of our seamless world. And then the history of little things reasserts itself. Rhythms and cycles of Life resumed, conservative and cautious, the history of mothers and of the continuum, the seams to set our wheel, diligently stitching the jagged tears, making the fabric whole again.
perhaps there is a third history also, The real History: the croupier of time that takes these two other histories, that rolls them together like two dice in a cup and watches with neutral and insouciance as the tides of great events wash capriciously on the vessels of individual lives. And which of us feels lucky today? Faites vos jeux. "
March 13, 2022
Great book. Amazing character development of the main character. How all the believes he held in life turn out to be different and how to let go of them.
October 25, 2010
I guess you could call my slightly lower rating than usual the disappointment that came with incorrect expectations of what I was actually reading - whenever a book cover blurb claims the work is "funny but touching" it is really trying to disguise often the idea that some people won't read serious fiction unless they're pushed to.
People like me that is, who after reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz temporarily had a love affair with late 20th Century themed nostalgia novels based on the idea of families affected by the tribulations of dictatorships and wars in countries some people can't even locate on a map. The theme of The Breaking of Eggs is the central premise that the fascist and communist regimes a man and his brother lived under respectively were viewed as justified since "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" - that is to say totalitarian regimes view the suffering of the people as beneficial to the greater good.
And here I was expecting a Goodbye Lenin! type story where amusing reminiscing about communism would be had, but what I got was Gran Torino with the happy sucked out. Feliks is a bitter old man whose life's work is a travel guide to the Soviet Union, which is utterly useless now that the Soviet Union no longer exists. He is reunited with his brother who gives him hope of meeting his mother again and the lost love he had during the war.
It breaks my heart to snob legitimate contemporary literature about the experiences of 20th Century fascist regime victims, but I think the main problem with the genre of this kind of fiction is that these types of stories have little to no joy in them, and while they are important they shouldn't be marketed under the label "touching but funny".
My God did I feel like I was hit by a ton of bricks made from chunks of the Berlin Wall that my autistic brain couldn't begin to make sense of all at once. The reason why The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao worked as a critique of these sort of dictatorships is that there's hope represented by youthful protagonists who aim to achieve victory over the utter misery of their ancestor's pasts. The main character in this book, Feliks, to me as a young person was unrelatable in every way, and came off as an embattled old man who didn't really see any hope in any aspect of his daily life. There's multiple descriptions of rape in this in terms of what happened to the women of Poland from both the Nazis and the Russians, but to lump all this misery and anguish on the reader at once without a single hint of hoping for the better - that's where this book lost me. I wasn't expecting this from a book which lied to me on the blurb that told me it was "touching but funny" - and believe me I wanted to believe it but JESUS, even Welcome to the NHK was more "touching but funny" than this, and that's about horribly mentally unstable people who are at times suicidal!
I guess I was just given something I thought was completely different to what I got.
People like me that is, who after reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz temporarily had a love affair with late 20th Century themed nostalgia novels based on the idea of families affected by the tribulations of dictatorships and wars in countries some people can't even locate on a map. The theme of The Breaking of Eggs is the central premise that the fascist and communist regimes a man and his brother lived under respectively were viewed as justified since "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" - that is to say totalitarian regimes view the suffering of the people as beneficial to the greater good.
And here I was expecting a Goodbye Lenin! type story where amusing reminiscing about communism would be had, but what I got was Gran Torino with the happy sucked out. Feliks is a bitter old man whose life's work is a travel guide to the Soviet Union, which is utterly useless now that the Soviet Union no longer exists. He is reunited with his brother who gives him hope of meeting his mother again and the lost love he had during the war.
It breaks my heart to snob legitimate contemporary literature about the experiences of 20th Century fascist regime victims, but I think the main problem with the genre of this kind of fiction is that these types of stories have little to no joy in them, and while they are important they shouldn't be marketed under the label "touching but funny".
My God did I feel like I was hit by a ton of bricks made from chunks of the Berlin Wall that my autistic brain couldn't begin to make sense of all at once. The reason why The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao worked as a critique of these sort of dictatorships is that there's hope represented by youthful protagonists who aim to achieve victory over the utter misery of their ancestor's pasts. The main character in this book, Feliks, to me as a young person was unrelatable in every way, and came off as an embattled old man who didn't really see any hope in any aspect of his daily life. There's multiple descriptions of rape in this in terms of what happened to the women of Poland from both the Nazis and the Russians, but to lump all this misery and anguish on the reader at once without a single hint of hoping for the better - that's where this book lost me. I wasn't expecting this from a book which lied to me on the blurb that told me it was "touching but funny" - and believe me I wanted to believe it but JESUS, even Welcome to the NHK was more "touching but funny" than this, and that's about horribly mentally unstable people who are at times suicidal!
I guess I was just given something I thought was completely different to what I got.
May 11, 2012
Three point five.
I appreciated what the author was trying to do here, though the overall effect was marred because several of the key characters lacked credibility. The central character is clueless, befuddled, insular, and rigid in nearly all his attitudes toward life and his fellow humans. When the Berlin Wall comes down, it sets in motion events that force him to undertake some much-needed soul-searching. The plot is intriguing and deftly-handled, for the most part.
All things considered, this is an interesting story about the ways in which someone from the opposing side of the Cold War is forced to confront the new world order that began in 1989. Though some of its premises are more than a little shaky, it does offer an engaging twist on the personal drama that underpinned the perpetual conflicts that tormented 20th century Europe.
I appreciated what the author was trying to do here, though the overall effect was marred because several of the key characters lacked credibility. The central character is clueless, befuddled, insular, and rigid in nearly all his attitudes toward life and his fellow humans. When the Berlin Wall comes down, it sets in motion events that force him to undertake some much-needed soul-searching. The plot is intriguing and deftly-handled, for the most part.
All things considered, this is an interesting story about the ways in which someone from the opposing side of the Cold War is forced to confront the new world order that began in 1989. Though some of its premises are more than a little shaky, it does offer an engaging twist on the personal drama that underpinned the perpetual conflicts that tormented 20th century Europe.
February 24, 2017
I wanted to like this book because of the setting and the subject, but I found the prose frustratingly boring and colorless. There are so few sensory details about any of the places Feliks goes that he might as well not be there at all. You could argue that Feliks simply doesn't experience the world that way, and that he, himself, is boring, but to me that made him a capitalist's caricature of a Communist, someone who is more concerned with political ideals than with things people want and feel. The second half of the book, admittedly, is more engaging, because Feliks begins to feel grief and love, but even those passages lack immediacy because the revelations occur in letters and dialogue rather than in dramatized scenes.
March 11, 2011
As strange as it is to say, the narrator -- a 61 year old Polish communist living in France in 1991 -- reminded me a lot of myself. I think that's why I connected to the book so much. Feliks lives in a strange self-created bubble, and as the bubble pops, he has to deal with the ramifications of the life he sheltered himself from and the choices he made/didn't make.
It is hard for Americans to understand the mindset of post-World War II Europe. Yes, we fought in the war, many, many brave men and women died fighting for freedom and democracy, but we just don't have the same mindset. We went HOME after the war. For Europe, the war was home. And I think it's hard for us to wrap our minds around that. Powell does a spectacular job of that by including an American character who also doesn't get it.
I am a fan of books that play with the perceptions of memory and ideas. This is the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog tried to be and failed. I'm glad I picked this one up out of the dollar bin.
It is hard for Americans to understand the mindset of post-World War II Europe. Yes, we fought in the war, many, many brave men and women died fighting for freedom and democracy, but we just don't have the same mindset. We went HOME after the war. For Europe, the war was home. And I think it's hard for us to wrap our minds around that. Powell does a spectacular job of that by including an American character who also doesn't get it.
I am a fan of books that play with the perceptions of memory and ideas. This is the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog tried to be and failed. I'm glad I picked this one up out of the dollar bin.
May 31, 2015
The Breaking Of Eggs This was the monthly book in the Book Discussion Scheme that I belong to.
I did not enjoy reading this book because the main character is so annoying that every page grates. I wanted to shake him and shout in his face, 'Wake Up!"
If that was the authors intent then 'well done that man'.
It was the same considered opinion of the others in the group too. Only one person actually enjoyed reading it. What really astounded me though was the discussion that followed about this book. I have never heard my group talk so long or in such depth about any book before. Whatever you have created Jim Powell it sure has a powerful effect.
Obviously well written and crafted but would I recommend it to anyone?
Maybe, depending on the person. I am an immigrant to this country (New Zealand) so I could relate to some bits quite strongly, especially on the subject of where one feels that home is. I think anyone with an interest in politics would like it, or maybe I should say, be able to appreciate it.
Challenging but brilliant
I did not enjoy reading this book because the main character is so annoying that every page grates. I wanted to shake him and shout in his face, 'Wake Up!"
If that was the authors intent then 'well done that man'.
It was the same considered opinion of the others in the group too. Only one person actually enjoyed reading it. What really astounded me though was the discussion that followed about this book. I have never heard my group talk so long or in such depth about any book before. Whatever you have created Jim Powell it sure has a powerful effect.
Obviously well written and crafted but would I recommend it to anyone?
Maybe, depending on the person. I am an immigrant to this country (New Zealand) so I could relate to some bits quite strongly, especially on the subject of where one feels that home is. I think anyone with an interest in politics would like it, or maybe I should say, be able to appreciate it.
Challenging but brilliant
June 12, 2011
Entirely forgettable first novel that doesn't seem to quite know what it is trying to say. Via a retrospective tour of the predictable milestones of twentieth-century European history we are meant to share in the realisation of the central character's Communist naivety yet all his 'teachers' - the elder brother who abandoned him with his Nazi uncle in favour of fleeing to the capitalist West, the French agent who entraps him into unwittingly betraying his comrades with false promises about the whereabouts of his mother after the Holocaust, even his Right-wing extremist Parisian landlady who votes for le Pen - are themselves all morally compromised. None of the events endured by these characters provokes much sympathy so what you are left with is the sense of a polemic with neither the necessary technical prowess nor the human empathy to properly pull it off. A better editor might have helped - how can one refer to the 'habitual acuity' of a half-brother one has only just met after an absence of 50 years?
November 23, 2010
I was given this book from a vendor who was speaking at a meeting about how to give quick summaries of books to entice others to read it. He summarized this book as "A coming of age story about a 60-year old communist man in today's world" (or something like that). Well, it was that and more. This is really a charming book about an older man who hasn't changed in 40 years until suddenly he begins examining his life and revealing secrets that challenge his intellectual and emotional foundations. I enjoyed the writing style so much that I kept thinking that it was a non-fiction, memoir that I was reading. The author did a fantastic job of allowing the main character to continually reassess his political and social philosophical ideals. If you like a book about a character that eventually embraces inevitable change and enjoy reading about how he/she deals with that adventure, give this book a try.
November 22, 2010
I often hear friends talk about "reinventing" themselves which often means moving to a new place or starting a new job. The main character in Breaking of Eggs, Feliks, does more than reinvent himself; he has to confront information that changes his core beliefs and very identity. The book is mostly about this transformation, and as a result is descriptive and philosophical. Even when the reader first meets Feliks with his communist views and rigidity he is still a sympathetic character and I was amazed at how convincing his ability to examine his life and beliefs was presented.
August 16, 2016
I wasn't sure whether to give it 3 1/2 stars or 4. I especially enjoyed the first part of the book. I can best describe it as a group of stereotypical people who live through WWII and the years thereafter and the decisions and lives they have made. This enabled the writer to philosophise about how much people make their own choices and how much life is a result of events beyond their control. It certainly gave food for thought.
August 25, 2013
Increasing enough,a bit slow in the first half and then lots crammed into the second, but a bit like the main character maybe it was just slow to open up.
A good way of telling the story of war from several angles, and its effect on all.
A good way of telling the story of war from several angles, and its effect on all.
November 25, 2013
Loved this book. Another one of those I did not expect to like but fell in love with. Will be reading more from this author.
July 24, 2016
Ein sú albesta sem ég hef lesið
November 5, 2017
Great characters in a thoughtful, comic, tragic journey of self-discovery.
July 14, 2017
Feliks Zhukovski, a 61 year old man of Polish descent, lives in Paris as a writer of a travel guide to Eastern Europe. Once a member of the Communist Party, and still a self-proclaimed leftist, his life starts unravelling after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. He is forced to re-evaluate his life and redefine his place in a world where all his previously held convictions no longer seem so tenable.
This is an engaging and compelling account of one man’s journey of self-discovery set against a backdrop of the cataclysmic events of the latter part of the 20th century.
An ambitious book, it is not without its faults. At times the characterisation is a little weak and the dialogue somewhat stilted, but these quibbles are easy to ignore as the reader becomes totally caught up in the drama of the story and the predicaments faced by all those caught up in the turmoil of war and displacement.
The wide range of historical events and the issues associated with them that Powell tackles in this book make it an excellent book group choice, while at the same time making it both moving and memorable as an individual read.
This is an engaging and compelling account of one man’s journey of self-discovery set against a backdrop of the cataclysmic events of the latter part of the 20th century.
An ambitious book, it is not without its faults. At times the characterisation is a little weak and the dialogue somewhat stilted, but these quibbles are easy to ignore as the reader becomes totally caught up in the drama of the story and the predicaments faced by all those caught up in the turmoil of war and displacement.
The wide range of historical events and the issues associated with them that Powell tackles in this book make it an excellent book group choice, while at the same time making it both moving and memorable as an individual read.
August 13, 2017
At the age of 61, Féliks is confronted by changes that undermine his long-held beliefs in Communism and his solitary existence in Paris.
The sale to an American company of the travel guide to the Eastern bloc that Féliks set up and updated every year for decades sets in motion a chain of events that lead to unprecedented changes and upheaval in Féliks' life. Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism across Europe. Féliks' staunchly held views are challenged and questioned, not only in relation to politics, but also in relation to his family history.
This novel is about lack of communication, blinkered and ill-founded beliefs and the ability to change, however late in life it may seem.
Féliks' family history leaves some unanswered questions; for example, why did Féliks and Woody not try to trace their mother?
The novel raises interesting issues about the importance of family bonds, misguided beliefs and the ability to change.
I read the Kindle version which had an annoying persistent printing error; three symbols replaced brackets and hyphens throughout the text.
The sale to an American company of the travel guide to the Eastern bloc that Féliks set up and updated every year for decades sets in motion a chain of events that lead to unprecedented changes and upheaval in Féliks' life. Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism across Europe. Féliks' staunchly held views are challenged and questioned, not only in relation to politics, but also in relation to his family history.
This novel is about lack of communication, blinkered and ill-founded beliefs and the ability to change, however late in life it may seem.
Féliks' family history leaves some unanswered questions; for example, why did Féliks and Woody not try to trace their mother?
The novel raises interesting issues about the importance of family bonds, misguided beliefs and the ability to change.
I read the Kindle version which had an annoying persistent printing error; three symbols replaced brackets and hyphens throughout the text.
April 28, 2018
An exploration of Felks Zhukovski's emotional life at the age of 60 when his world is turned upside down. Separated from his family at the age of 9 at the outbreak of World War II, he identifies with communists first and then "leftists" and becomes the sole author and publisher of a travel guide to the Eastern bloc, traveling from his apartment in Paris. In 1991, when the Soviet state has collapsed, and East Germany is shown not the economic miracle he had imagined, he can no longer continue his travel guide and sells it to an American publisher. He then begins to find his lost brother and family members and unearths long-held misconceptions and angers. His life is transformed as he begins to see what happened these 30 years from others' points of view and reinvents his emotional life.
August 3, 2018
"quando la diga cede, cede"- dice uno dei personaggi di questo straordinario romanzo di formazione al contrario, in cui al crollo del Muro di Berlino corrisponde il crollo di tutte le certezze del protagonista che, atrraverso il passaggio obbligato di una rilettura dell'ideologia nelle vite dei suoi affetti più cari, è costretto a rivedere quello in cui ha sempre creduto e, in definitiva, se stesso. Tematica impegnativissima chel'autore risolve dal punto di vista narrativo con una prosa scorrevole, alleggerita da una vena di ironia, con personaggi molto ben delineati e una capacità di avvincere che ti incolla a ciascuna delle 330 pagine del romanzo. Bellissimo libro, anche da rileggere.
January 22, 2024
about a man in his 60's who is a confirmed leftist (as he puts it), previously having been a card carrying communist. Born in Poland, sent to Switzerland with his older brother to live with an aunt and uncle who don't really want them, and ending up in Paris where he publishes a travel guide to Eastern Europe. With the Berlin wall coming down the whole world is changing and so is Feliks's life. He has to reevaluate all his beliefs, look at where he came from and how he lives.
This an interesting commentary on the times and how you're never to old to change but still hold on to your beliefs.
I really enjoyed this book.
This an interesting commentary on the times and how you're never to old to change but still hold on to your beliefs.
I really enjoyed this book.
February 9, 2025
’You are not alone. Everyone has a different story, but everyone has the same story.’
How is this not more widely read!
This was a fascinating story, both personally and politically. And so well written it felt like it must have been based on a real person.
I loved the interweaving stories and the fact that it always felt like there was something new to discover.
I have no idea why I own a copy of this book, or why it seems like not that many people have read it, but I do know that I wish I’d got to it sooner.
How is this not more widely read!
This was a fascinating story, both personally and politically. And so well written it felt like it must have been based on a real person.
I loved the interweaving stories and the fact that it always felt like there was something new to discover.
I have no idea why I own a copy of this book, or why it seems like not that many people have read it, but I do know that I wish I’d got to it sooner.
June 27, 2018
I didn't like Feliks Zhukovski, but I felt I understood him very well.
As I read I felt a particular kinship with him. I know what it is to have one's world turned upside down and inside out.
The book provides the reader with brief history of post WWII Europe and an insight into how the "common folks" of the continent navigated the social currents that were flowing over Europe after the war.
As I read I felt a particular kinship with him. I know what it is to have one's world turned upside down and inside out.
The book provides the reader with brief history of post WWII Europe and an insight into how the "common folks" of the continent navigated the social currents that were flowing over Europe after the war.
March 3, 2019
Five star! is this a first for me? Found this easy to read but challenging vocabulary - had to look up meanings a few times. Also challenging political concepts, communism, Stalinism, Americanism, Christianity but in a soft ideological discussion punctuated with some harsh true life experiences. Followed Feliks through his encapsulated lonely ideological life to his expansion into emotions and feelings with the lovely Kristin and their rebellious daughter.
December 29, 2019
En gribende og medrivende fortælling, der fører læseren gennem de sidste to verdenskrige, den kolde krig, de store fortællingers sammenbrud - kommunismen, fascismen, kapitalismen, og som fortælles gennem Feliks, hvis liv på forunderlig vis er formet af alle ismerne, men som også må siges at have levet sit liv i åndelig dovenskab. Det rådes der bod på, da fortællingen sættes i gang, og man rives med af et velkomponeret plot og et vedkommende persongalleri.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 119 reviews