Hopeful Monsters

by Nicholas Mosley

Book Overview

Meeting at a confrontation between Nazi and communist youth on the streets of Weimar Germany, Max and Eleanor begin a love affair that takes them from Stalin's Russia to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679739297
• ISBN13: 9780679739296
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 551 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Makes you very interested in history

I've never been much of a history buff, but while reading this story I found myself going online to research periods of time and events that were the backdrop of the book. And the characters' minds were very interesting. While I enjoyed the history aspect, it was the unique way in which the characters thought that made the book truly engaging.

Best novel hardly anybody has heard of

This book was recommended to me a decade ago and I loved it then, have reread it several times and will always be moved by it.Complex, challenging and always idiosyncratic while adhering to the grand tradition of the novel of ideas it has passages so dense and stimulating you want to memorize them or read it out aloud to whoever is listening. It tells the story of two idealistic individuals who are caught up in some of the crazier movements of the 20th century and manage what is so hard to do; to adventure from each other's safety and still stay true to the idea of each other. Despite the depth of the political analysis and the complexity of the portrayed philosophies I have always thought of it as primarily a love story that is both starcrossed and redeemed. By the time the author imagines them at rest as "one of these everlastingly happy couples on an Etruskan tomb" and the cancer( of fanaticism? of loneliness?) is dying it never fails to make me happy when I'm sad or sad when I'm happy.It reminds me of Niels Bohr who said that you recognize a profound truth by its opposite also being a profound truth.You guessed it: highly recommended

I liked what I could understand a lot

[T]he overall pattern of their story (so they seem to have been saying) had been one of trying to learn how to deal with the patterns of the self-destructive society they were part of--how to see clearly, how to try to become not destructive themselves, and by doing this to be doing what they could for society. -Hopeful MonstersI spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to avoid the topic, but it is impossible : Nicholas Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Fascists in the 1930s, caricatured in Aldous Huxley's Point-Counter Point and elsewhere. Nicholas also happens to be a highly regarded and quite accomplished novelists, so enough about that.It is often said by those seeking to defend James Joyce that those of us who dismiss him simply don't wish to be challenged. But Hopeful Monsters proves that a novel can challenge a reader intellectually but still provide him with an enjoyable reading experience. The story, which is actually just one part of the Catastrophe Practice series of novels, tells both the story of two lovers, Max Ackerman and Eleanor Anders, and of the 20th Century. Max is a young English physics student, who meets folks like Ludwig Wittgenstein at garden parties, Eleanor a German Jewish anthropologist, whose mother was a disciple of Rosa Luxemburg. Between them they meet many of the most influential figures of their time and contemplate nearly all of its trends and ideas, scientific, political, and philosophical.The hopeful monsters of the title are salamanders that Max raised as a boy and which physically adapted to their environment, evolving within a generation. Mosely's hopeful suggestion is that perhaps there's a kind of Heisenberg Principle for biology as well as for physics and that by observing ourselves and becoming conscious of the need to evolve beyond our current state, we will influence the process. We will evolve to the next level because we realize the need to do so. Or at least I think that's what he's saying. I'm not really sure, but I do know that the novel is a veritable blizzard of ideas, most of them interesting, some maddeningly elusive, but all of them worth pondering.Even with all this, Mosley never loses track of the complicated relationship between Max and Eleanor, In the final chapters of the book he brings them together for a final affecting scene and manages to tie up most of the philosophical gist of the book (I think). If you are looking for a novel that will make you think, but will keep your attention, you can't do better than this oneGRADE : A

hypnotic

This is an intense, complex, poetic novel about "love". Hard to put into words, but there are passages which tend to transport a person. It is truly worth the effort to try to track down a copy of this gem.

One of the most remarkable books ever written

This book,one of the most remarkable books ever written, achieves the nearly-impossible feat of covering the greater part of the 20th Century through the very specific eyes of two extraordinary people as they fall in love across time and distance. Through a unique and internalized form of correspondence full of remarkable detail and expansiveness between Max (British) and Eleanor (German) we are led through their personal histories and their unique worlds, beginning in pre-WWII Europe and culminating in present-day America. Through the metaphors of physics and biology the reader is invited to look through a microscope and a telescope simultaneously, a sensation which is absolutely unbeatable.