The Polyglots by William Gerhardie Nine out of 10

 The Polyglots by William Gerhardie

Nine out of 10

An impressive number of titans, role models, brilliant writers have written with admiration and awe about The Polyglots and the immense talent of the author, William Gerhardie, while the book sits on the prestigious list compiled by the Guardian…1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction - in the comedy section.

Nonetheless, this reader, though aware of the outstanding passages in this acclaimed book, such as the description of the ‘intestines that are delicate and therefore we should imagine when a cold blade comes into them and then the German babies that are beheaded in the sick imagination of one or another of the characters’ (these are just approximate renditions, not the exact quote) has not been enchanted, exuberant when reading through the rather long book, where personages have not become close enough to this shallow individual to make him concentrated on the likes of Captain Negodyaev, with his lunatic behavior, the paranoid breakdowns that make him get the family ready – once he will have managed to get his loveable, seven year old daughter, Natasha, and his long enduring wife reunited with him, under the roof of the bizarre aunt Teresa – to exit and depart into the middle of the night…

One of the reasons why the joy experienced by classics like Graham Greene – he has said about Gerhardie that ‘he was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life’- was not shared by the undersigned is that the characters appear to be too absurd, postmodernist or maybe surrealist at times – although upon consideration, we have such preposterous individuals around that we  should not blink when some dude does something extremely wild in The Polyglots and the two examples that arrive on the screen would be the fool that has established some kind of a distribution company in the middle of a gated community, right near me (how dare he?!) and a couple of hours ago, he has started washing his fleet – for the ten thousandth time in the past months – and the muck that is pouring in the common alley will freeze overnight and tomorrow I may find my precious vehicles crashed into by someone who sled over the cretin’s mess, while the other, overused example is that of the scoundrel that is about to be acquitted by his fellow republican goodfellas who will share in the guilt.

One of the outré, outlandish – ever since the Trump impeachment inquiry in the House, one may remain with the image of the formidable, Vietnam decorated veteran (as opposed to the coward in the White house and his phony bone spurs)  Ambassador Taylor and his response to the ‘outlandish provocation of the counselor who comes at the hearings with the sort of bad that my neighbor uses for grocery shopping – figures in The Polyglots is Uncle Lucy – that is right, it is uncle and not aunt – who would die – oops, spoiler alert…though he dies somewhere near the middle, perhaps in the first part – in such a crazy, exotic manner, dressed in the mauve silk knickers and boudoir cap that had belonged to aunt Teresa…

The book has some perfect advise and positive psychology rules, such as ‘what good is it if you are deliberately spoiling so many days and weeks of your short life by imagining the worst and once the bad scenario does not take place, you would have cheated yourself out of so many eons of your life and the knowledge that this damn unhappiness of your was just a phantom of your imagination will haunt you, but not retrieve a minute of the wasted life’ – this is not just an inexact quote, it now strikes as a very altered version that probably has very little with Gerhardie and more with the inattention and lack of concentration of this reader.

You can savor this wonderful book, but it seems this is only possible if you really give it your full awareness, as the way to enjoy the jocular, and very often sardonic tone in observations like ‘Sylvia Vanderflint likes something more fruity…with more killing in it’ or the question of ‘why do men have to die, with the answer that they do because they have to make room for others,  continued with the pondering of what are the ‘other’ men for …if you think you understand that, I congratulate you’…indeed, the author engages quite often, or for as long as I stayed with him, in a sort of jocular dialogue with readers, using self-deprecating  humor when he asserts that the narrator is handsome, only to be dismissed by other characters, or stating that the reader probably wonders why is he doing one thing or another…

Uncle Lucy has a strange relationship, understandably given that he is a most peculiar figure and so are almost, if not all the others, with aunt Teresa and when the Soviet Revolution arrives, they have financial and many other issues – including mental, one might suggest – and they argue over the fortune, dividends and what one owes to the other, until Lucy arrives with a colossal family, many children, resulting from legitimate matrimony and other affairs, offspring that seems largely unfamiliar to him – he asks the same girl about school and what class she is in – the husbands of daughters, cousins and servants, to find refuge under the roof of his – we might think – estranged sister, where there are no beds, it is explained, but the man says they will sleep on the floor…

There is also the personage of the late grandfather, who had not liked spending a penny apparently and the narrator invokes in different circumstances, such as when he dines with his would be wife – that may end up marrying someone else, and since there is no name or certainty attached to this sibylline uttering, there is no spoiler there – and he is appalled at the prospect of paying a fortune for the wing, which is more expensive, being bigger (!) than the whole chicken, or the exotic desert, the wines suggested by the oppressive, outré waiter and then on multiple occasions, when the image of the grandfather moving in outrage in the grave appears.