History: The Home Movie

by Craig Raine

Overview

A thoughtful and masterful novel in verse by an innovative 20th-century poet.

One of England's foremost poets, Craig Raine offers a "bold, ambitious chronicle of life" (New York Times Review) told through the stories of two families, the Pasternaks and the Raines, who touch each other and are touched by history in different ways. Like a home movie, this novel in verse masterfully conjures the world in which these families move by re-creating the texture of ordinary and extraordinary life. Blending fact, fiction, and thrilling leaps of imagination, History: The Home Movie promises to be the film you'll ever read.

"Craig Raine's History admirably reclaims poetry's narrative function, its capacity to fictionally propose a world as complex and mysterious as reality itself. A challenging, innovative, and unsettling novel in verse."--Los Angeles Times

"A sly, surprising, brilliant, and yes, readable book."--Boston Phoenix

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385476607
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/1996
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Craig Raine is a poet, lecturer, and critic. He is a fellow of New College, Oxford, the author of several poetry collections and books, and the editor of the journal Areté. He lives in Oxford, England.

Editorial Reviews

This ``novel in verse'' from British poet Raine (Rich) traces in tercets the 20th-century history of his family in Oxford, England, and of Boris Pasternak's in Russia. The subject matter echoes that of historical fiction or family chronicles like War and Peace or Buddenbrooks, but Raine tells it in family album-sized snapshots, with the verse reminiscent of Auden and Betjeman. From this discrete, disconnected perspective, events are presented with uniform, monotonous diffidence-whether adolescent masturbation, a lecture on theosophy by Yeats or a menacing telephone call from Stalin (major events, like Pasternak's winning of the Nobel Prize, are avoided altogether). History's parallels and coincidences, including musical mothers and leg injuries in both families and variations on trials (from libel suits to Stalin's show trials), thread through chronologically arranged sections alongside recurring poetic images (for example, the moon or spiders) and literary allusions (Shakespeare in particular). Raine's unvarying poetic approach to characters and incidents, whether mundane or complex, eventually fails to amass the sustained density of a novel's narrative and mood, however, and his imagination succeeds in recreating life only in insular England, not in tragic Russia. First serial to the New Yorker; author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The center of this versified novel reveals episodically the sad life of "arrogant, elegant" Boris Pasternak, his extended family, and his fellow writers. Characters who may or may not be fictional weather for almost 80 years the absurdity of uprooted contemporary life with detachment. Raine offers World War I sergeant Henry Raine, long-suffering wife Queenie, and their sons along with fastidious psychiatrist Elliot, Norman-the-boxer, and luckless Jimmy. Historical figures such as Conan Doyle, Eisenhower, Lenin, and Yeats appear and depart like marionettes, and nothing is very real-but it's splendid. With the panache of Aldous Huxley, he revitalizes Point Counter Point (1928), using Pasternak instead of D.H. Lawrence as a balancing agent to the dissipated behavior of the time. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes disgusting, the imagery mingles highbrow refinement with X-rated slang. One doesn't know if this "home movie" is satire or a roman clef. Whichever, it is finely stylized English wit.-Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute

Library Journal