A Week in Winter

Rating:
Summary: A novel for TODAY
Review: Barth Landor's A Week in Winter is compelling! I'd label it a "must read" for literature buffs and readers who want to enjoy a unique new voice in the crowded fiction scene. From the first page, I identified with the first person narrator, and I was swept along by believable dialogue and a suspenseful, tightly woven plot. The nurturing of a father toward his young son contrasts dramatically with the bureaucracy's disregard for individuals and grotesque abuse of human rights. A Week in Winter is amazingly relevant to NOW; a book for our times.
A reader in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Rating:
Summary: A Small Gem
Review: How refreshing to read a novel of ideas in this era of slick, gratutuitous, work-shopped, and often sentimental dross that afflict contemporary American letters. Landor has written a parable of our times, posing a very simple and universal question: How do we live our lives in the face of evil? A Week in Winter is perhaps even more salient as we witness the perversions occuring in Iraq--in fact this book should be required reading at the Pentagon.

Equally impressive is Landor's use of language. Here is a literate, thoughful narrator, more at home with Pascal than Home Depot, who is not afraid to admit his foibles, his vacillations, his petty fears. In Clark Landor creates a fully-formed character, humane and knowing, seeking widom, and yet fully aware of his limitations. The minor characters are equally well-drawn; Landor has an eye for detail that in a few short lines tell us all we need to know.

A very fine novel that readers of serious, literary fiction should not miss.

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Debut from Barth Landor
Review: The opening of this book appears to ask little of its reader at first, but this is a clever kind of deception, for when you reach the end, you will find it difficult not to weep.

The subtle, understated prose is a pleasure to read and the style economic, almost minimalist. But this is certainly a case in which less is more. The book is, as the title suggests, structured around the events of one week. Yet it is in fact the working week; the Monday to Friday with which we are so familiar in the West, which provides the time-scale. This simple structure is vital to the impact of the story as a whole, offsetting the complex deliberations and vacillations of the protagonist.

Within these few pages, for it has only 143 of them, a great tragedy unfolds. In fact there are two tragedies, the one indivisible from the other: one is finite, irredeemable, the other a contagion within our civilized world - and it is this latter condition that motivates this extraordinarily powerful book.

The main drama takes place within the mind of the narrator. Clark is a weary worker in a remote American consulate in Eastern Europe, disillusioned by his job, his career. He is deeply disappointed by those around him; his hopes for friendship with his colleagues long since faded:

'Once I thought such a fine profession would perfectly suit me; now I find myself disagreeably altered by it. It changes the way I relate to my world, causing me to distort the significance of success.'

He has become an outsider; he sees his name, literally separated from those of his colleagues, on a tick off sheet, the context of which he cannot discern. He consoles himself with reading great literature. Gradually his meditations and deliberations draw us in closer and we start to travel with him, with every twist and turn of his conscience as events unfold: we see him managing his young son in the temporary absence of his wife, telling him unlikely tales in order to win his obedience or avoid the directness of his questions; we see him struggle with his weakness and exhaustion and with what is contained in each ordinary day - for it takes little to drag him down. Every nuance of the preparations being made for an important visitor to the consulate irritates him - he cannot partake in all the fuss. He seems paranoid, projecting all his insecurity onto others. Why has he been given the most menial of jobs?

But then he makes a connection with someone who is herself an outsider, a persecuted soul, and he finally resolves to follow his instincts against the probable wishes of his superiors by helping her. A chink of light enters his heart and his humanity is re-awakened; for a time he even notices that his co-workers are engaged in tasks as menial as his own and he feels some alliance with them. But then come small but significant moments of personal revelation and lucidity which coalesce gradually into a resolve which never the less vacillates until the moment of action.

What he discovers as a result of his decision is an atrocity which cancels any doubt that he is doing the right thing. Yet events occur beyond his control and the agonies of the whole week pour into one moment. Clark is left with one final chance to stand up to his superiors.

I particularly enjoyed the descriptive details which unselfconsciously reveal Clark's feelings and the way he relates to his world: one of my favourite details was of the office manager 'unsurpassed in the art of looking indispensable,' and of whom Clark wonders 'whether it really is his enterprises, large and small, which give birth to his purposeful manner, and not the manner itself breeding the enterprises.'

But the value of this book is far greater than the sum of its contents, for we are taken on a journey of monumental importance to our age which lifts off the page.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a remarkable debut that will attract readers across the globe.