The Breaking of Eggs: A Novel
By Jim Powell
(Penguin,
352 pages, $15 paper)
This impressive first novel is part coming of age story and part
spy story, with a primer on 20th century European history thrown
in. History at the most personal, small-picture level. It’s also
about redemption, second chances, and what home means.
Most readers will identify, though maybe not from the first
few pages, with Feliks Zhukovski. He’s the repressed, somewhat
unreliable, but still engaging narrator of
Breaking who not only comes of age, a bit
late at 61, but comes to life as communism dies in Europe. The
friendless, never-married, emotionally stunted Feliks has used
Marxist ideology to keep life at bay for decades.
As the novel opens Feliks is an example of Political Man at
his most arid and abstracted. He is, as some of Al Gore’s own
supporters describe him, a man-like creature. Vital parts are
missing. Then, as a series of revelations shake up his personal
life as much as the communist infarct challenges his political
beliefs, we see Felix struggle to, as the modern phrase has it,
get a life.
Born in Poland and hustled out of that luckless country
just days before the Germans invaded in 1939, Feliks and his
older brother ride out the war in Switzerland at the home of a
weak and distant aunt and her overbearing German husband. Their
mother doesn’t come with them, which Feliks sees as abandonment.
During the war the brother leaves this tense foster arrangement
for the romance of the French resistance, leaving Feliks a party
of one.
Alone after the war, Feliks fetches up in Paris. The
bruised and inadequate Feliks, wanting change he can believe in,
and something to replace the family that deserted him, joins the
French Communist Party. He works at a Peugeot factory and even
writes for a time at a communist newspaper financed by the USSR.
But there’s little future in red journalism, even for a guy like
Feliks who’s officially non-materialistic. So in 1955 he starts a
series of travel guides to the countries of Eastern Europe,
describing these countries and their charms in a manner
consistent with the official Soviet line.
In Soviet days there was never great demand to tour the
gloomy fleshpots of Eastern Europe, where the favorite TV program
was “Bowling for Food” and the hotel cleaning lady almost
certainly reported to the Stasi (or its equivalent in other
down-at-heel workers’ paradises). But Feliks’s guides to these
destinations were the only ones available, so he made an adequate
living for decades from this enterprise and toured Soviet Bloc
countries every year to keep his guides up to date. While not
traveling he lives a bloodless life in his unadorned Paris
apartment and may have done so for the duration had not the
Soviet system begun its two-year implosion in 1989. Says
Feliks:
I still find the events of that year utterly bewildering.
It would be fair to say that my own attachment to communism was
already weaker by then.
I had ceased to be a party member in
1968. But I remained, in principle, a supporter of what the
Soviet system sought to achieve…. It felt like the entire
edifice of my life was being torn down in front of me.
But Felix doesn’t stay at this low ebb. An offer to buy his
now obsolete travel guides by an American company leads to a trip
to the decadent America Feliks has always despised. To get the
required visa for the America trip, Feliks makes connection at
the American embassy in Paris with a mysterious French official
with one of that nation’s spook agencies. From resistance days,
this man knows Feliks’ brother, who didn’t abandon Feliks but
simply couldn’t find him in the chaos that was Europe just after
the war.
In short order Felix reconnects with his brother who now
lives in Columbus, Ohio, finds a long letter from his mother, and
tracks down the only woman he ever had a romance with, now
available in Berlin. All bets are off. Almost nothing is what is
has seemed for all these years.
Feliks has always been a man of principle, but he’s
organized his principles around a bankrupt ideology that promises
all the answers to life’s first questions but doesn’t deliver.
And the ideology has been hijacked, as extreme ideologies tend to
be, by unprincipled thugs who just use it to exercise power over
millions of people like Feliks. The last third of the novel shows
Feliks groping for a new basis for his principles, and a way to
assemble what’s left of his life. There are no blinding light
moments or epiphanies, just gradual understanding, achieved at
Feliks’ plodding pace. Just one example:
It was all very well deriding the materialism of American
society,
but the fact was that most of the people I had met in
eastern Europe
lived equally materialistic lives, just less
successful ones.”
The title of the book comes from the apology for communism,
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” Feliks
finally sees that what Stalin and his gangster successors were
breaking was not eggs but human lives by the millions.
A strength of the novel is that it sheds light on the great
themes and tragedies of the 20th century, especially the almost
unfathomable horror that was World War II, in a very personal way
through the life of one family. Feliks’s mother and brother and
girlfriend Ingrid tell stories of their engagement with that war
and its long aftermath that can’t fail to move
readers.
The novel is wise and witty, but at some points a bit
talky. But this is probably unavoidable in a story about a man
who organizes his life around politics. Some of the more
satisfying passages in the book are from Feliks’s mother’s letter
to him, and the conversations he has with Kristin, his only
romance from the old days who he’s fortunate enough to reunite
with. These two apolitical women (perhaps anti-political covers
it better) clearly understand politics and its effects far better
than does the hyper-political Feliks, and can express themselves
about it economically.
Jim Powell, 61 like Feliks and a citizen of the U.K., came
to writing late after careers in advertising and business. He has
no political message of his own, unless it’s a warning about all
extreme ideologies. He has described himself as a centrist Tory.
A “wet,” is the British designation — what you’d get if Olympia
Snowe stood for Parliament — which, by the way, Powell did once
and lost. He’s working on a second novel.
