Brodeck: A Novel is a stunning, disturbing, and thoroughly fabulous book. It is beautifully, artistically, and powerfully written -- which I assume means that Mr. Claudel can write like a demon and that his translator, John Cullen, has delivered a performance at the top of his game.
Brodeck is essentially some strange cross between Jerzy Kosinski, The Brothers Grimm, and Franz Kafka. It is a lyrical, introspective, yet foreboding, dark, and ominous. The story is set is some indeterminate yet familiar middle-European country. Brodeck, a resident (for vague reasons) and survivor of a prison/concentration camp during an unnamed war (quite reminiscent perhaps of WWII), returns to his home village and to his wife and child. Not soon after, he is drafted by the town's mayor to write a treatise essentially absolving the village inhabitants of the murder of a mysterious (and wondrous) stranger.
This is a book about the banality of evil, and hatred, and dark, furtive secrets. But is is mostly a powerful and hugely disturbing exploration of what it is like to be the "other", the strange one, the person out of place in society. Brodeck grows up different. Orphaned early (but we really do not know how), he is picked up by a old woman on the road who takes him to another village to live. Brodeck leaves his village to attend the university in the city - and at that university he is out of place, the strange one, not like the others. It is not completely clear what distinguishes Brodeck from his classmates -- it is (as is much in this novel) left unspecified - his he a Gypsy? a Jew? a country bumpkin? Not defined, but definitely different. When war breaks out he is thrown into a concentration camp where he survives by becoming a guard's pet. Literally. Brodeck becomes Brodeck the Dog, moving about on all fours, eating from bowl on the ground. He returns to his village and his job as a writer of reports for some vague government bureaucracy. On day, and stranger arrives in town....the stranger is, well, strange. He talks in a formal florid style, he dresses differently, he takes lodging at the village inn (run by the village mayor, he has apparent wealth and spends it in the village and in entertainments for the villagers. The stranger is polite and friendly. He takes long, solitary walks and is forever writing things down in his book. When he exhibits his drawings, they turn out to be accurate, but unflattering (and more than a little insightful) portraits of the village inhabitants....and he is later murdered. Brodeck is drafted to provide the official, whitewashed version of events.
Brodeck knows about being "the other" and is now writing about his own village's treatment of a different "other". Brodeck "knows how men act when they know they are not alone, when the can melt into a crowd and be absorbed into a mass that encompasses and transcends them, a mass comprising thousands of faces like theirs....the truth is that the crowd itself is a monster...there are no peaceful crowds, either. Even when there's laughter, smiles, music, choruses, behind all that there's blood: vexed, overheated, inflamed blood, stirred and maddened in its own vortex". Words borne from experience, in Brodeck's case. Phenomenal writing in Claudel's case.
Claudel is exploring the world where everyone hates the foreigner, the stranger, the other. Truly, as Claudel sees it, "there are no happy crowds". Brodeck, abandoned as a child, raised by a strange outsider, attending a university as a unique minority, imprisoned and abused for no discernible logic, and living amongst those he knows have their doubts - he knows what it is like to be on the outside and is wrestling with absolving his fellow villagers of the crime of which he knows they are guilty. He really knows..."people are afraid of someone who keeps quiet. Someone who says nothing. Someone who looks and says nothing. If he stays mute, how can we know what he's thinking?" and "but down here, it is best never to be right. That's one thing you always end up paying a very high price for."
Claudel's insight into the hearts and minds is astonishingly good. He knows about ignorance and how it breeds mass hysteria and collective cowardice. Through Brodeck, he observes that "stupidity is a sickness that goes very well with fear. They batten on each other, creating a gangrene that seeks only to propagate itself."
In the end, it is Brodeck's capacity - in the face of everything else - to continue to love that gives us hope. While elucidating the terrible pain that humans visit upon each other, the stupid violence of crowds, the evil visited upon others in the name of hatred, Brodeck can still love.
This is a fabulous novel. Please read it.
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