Greg BaxterReseñas

An American has recently moved to a city in Central Europe. It's a cold day sometime before Christmas and he meets up with a woman he's recently met to look for an apartment to rent. As they travel around the city, meeting up with her friends, looking at this place he's decided to call home and looking for the apartment, the man thinks back over his life, especially his time in Iraq. There are also memories that lead to digressions about music and art. Not much happens, and while it's not an ordinary day, it's not a remarkable one.

And yet, I was entirely pulled into this exercise in minimalism. This is written in a way that places the reader entirely within the setting of the novel, feeling the cold from the snow seep through your shoes, smelling the sausages for sale at the Christmas market, seeing the daylight fade in the afternoon. Greg Baxter knows how to evoke a setting. He also knows how to build a character, letting the details arise organically as the novel progresses. This short novel is a masterclass in character-development and in creating a setting, even if neither the protagonist nor the city are ever named.

We are not given the name of the European city the narrator of The Apartment has moved to but it feels like Prague in many ways.
The novel is spread over one day but flits around other times in the near past and further when he was in the military and a security worker in the Middle East. It is cold and winter and we read how he had to buy warmer shoes and on this day he buys a warm coat.
He meets his friend Saskia and she is helping him to find an apartment to live in. He appears to be trying to find a new life, isn't keen to develop new friendships but, despite this, enjoys Saskia's company. The topics in the book stretch wide and varied, art and architecture are discussed and music and even billiards. Tales from his time as a young adult appear too, including about his friend who died and death is certainly prevalent in the novel, including opposite the apartment where there is a cemetery. The novel has an intimate feel and is written with a gentle pace that never stops, there are no chapters and few paragraphs, it is a stream of words from the narrators head. Although his thoughts talk of loss there is a sense of hope for something new and loving underneath. An excellent read.

A short story, but in no way is it light or an easy read. I don't mean that as an insult, often shorter stories tend to be books you read on a lazy afternoon.

The book is all one long chapter. It's an unusual format, but I feel like the format works well with the storyline. It's all one big, long day. It's mostly thoughts, some memories, some conversation, but it all takes place in one day.
Not much happens in this day, a man looks for an apartment with the help of a new acquaintance/friend.

He has spent years trying to isolate himself in the world. He doesn't like himself much, he doesn't like the world much and he doesn't form attachments with other people easily. He pretty much fights attachments to people.

But here he is, on a fairly insignificant day, doing something pretty usual (apartment hunting) and for him this day stands out in a way because of his new acquaintance and the possibility that he's going to be putting down roots in this new city.

I'm not sure what to say beyond that. I didn't love it, I didn't dislike it. I felt like there was going to be a big obvious lesson at the end, but there wasn't. It's just about a man trying to isolate himself from everyone and everything and where he's at at this particular day in his life.

Written from the point of view of a man whose sister was found dead of starvation in her Berlin apartment, this is the story of his father and his trip to Germany to bring the body back to the USA. It takes place in Munich Airport as they wait for a connecting flight and seemlessly flows back and forth between the present and the past as the narrator thinks about his journey.

This is a beautifully sparse, minimalist work about the atomisation of society, loneliness, loss and the meaninglessness of much of modern living. The nameless and almost faceless narrator, and his nameless and almost characterless father have come to Germany to retrieve the body of the narrator's sister, Miriam, who in a world of plenty has chosen to starve herself to death (the word anorexia is never once mentioned).

As they wait at Munich Airport with American consulate official Trish (who has separation problems of her own), about to return to America with Miriam's body, father and son's last three weeks in Germany are recounted in flashback, as are various episodes in the family's life. The main motif is loneliness and emptiness. The father, a retired History lecturer, roams his large house, empty after the death of his wife, occasionally watching golf. His son, a marketing consultant based in London, goes from working for a large company to working for himself, seeming to isolate himself yet further. Apart from occasional cold sex, he seems to have few connections. Even Miriam, starving herself in Berlin may seem empowering, but she seems to have had few friends - getting her Berlin contacts together for memorial drinks is hard work.

Father and son spend their time in Germany, as they wait for the body to be released, in first a burst of gluttony, then in denial. They feel sick - not hungry. And as they wait in Munich Airport for their plane, delayed by fog, the narrator becomes ever more grief stricken and gradually loses his iron self discipline and control

This is an excellent book with scarcely a word out of place. Minus half a star for an incident that displays the father's relative helplessness that I thought unnecessarily scatalogical. And if you are setting your book in an airport, you need to get flight details right (an Etihad flight would be leaving for Abu Dhabi not Dubai). But generally excellent½

This came to me via the wrapped Bookcrossing Christmas mystery book. I unwrapped it and ended up reading it all in one afternoon but I can't say if that is because it was very compelling or readable or merely because I wanted an afternoon of reading. It's a strange one, starts out reminding me of novels like The Mezzanine or Wide Sargasso Sea but took more than a few weird turns along the way. I finally began to wonder if the unnamed narrator has PTSD but finally deiceded I had no idea what to make of it. Interesting but I think my next read will have a plot.

This short novel is literally a day in the life of a 40ish ex-Naval officer who is searching for some measure of anonymity in a new city. On this day, a young woman he's befriended helps him find an apartment. As the day progresses, we learn a bit about the man's past and are able to draw conclusions about why he feels a need to shed that past and start over. But we don't know for sure. This is a story about connections, and about how much we really know people. Very subtle, surprisingly satisfying.½

Although throughout this unsettling novel we are in Munich Airport with the narrator, his father and Trish, a consular official, waiting for a delayed plane to Atlanta that will take them and the body of their siser / daughter, Miriam, who has died of starvation in Berlin. This is enough to make any reader realise that this is not a feel good novel. The novel is unsettling through the structure, there are no chapters and paragraphs are long and the action is sometimes in the airport in linear time and sometimes in the past and at other times recalls the last two weeks that they have been in Germany sorting out Miriam's affairs and taking a road trip along the Rhine. The brother and father's reaction to Miriam's death is understandable; they firstly binge on high living and good food and then stop eating and fast, enjoying the light-headedness of not eating. The novel is deep but not always clear and as the narrator, the brother makes little attempt to understand his actions, lost as he is in the grief of losing his sister and recalling the few times he had seen her in the past ten years or so. I found I was lost in the chilling and distressing environment of this novel, I was in transit in the airport, waiting.

I've got so much to mull over since I just finished this one. It's a complete stream-of-consiousness from beginning to end . . . all 193 pages. It weaves in and out of what's happening today (looking for an apartment in a foreign city) to the past and how our memories come back to us with the smallest of promptings. I was never bored with it. There was one moment where they were getting to the apartment he's going to look at and I began reading faster and faster, thinking we were just going to go directly to the apartment. Nope - 20 pages later perhaps, but not right now. It's an exercise in patience, but a rewarding one. The author's phrasing and rhythms are wonderfully different. I enjoyed it a lot.

An ex-pat American living in London learns that his sister, Miriam, who had been living in Berlin has died of starvation. The news is both a shock and possibly expected. At any rate, it catalyses arcane reactions in her brother, who has not spoken to her in at least five years, and in their elderly widowed father whose estrangement from her extends even further into the past. Father and son meet in Berlin and undertake the repatriation of the body with the help of a consular official named Trish. Apparently standard bureaucratic delay prevents the release of the body for more than two weeks. And in that time both father and son, and to a lesser extent Trish, undergo flights of alienation and excess — renting a furnished luxury penthouse, hiring a car to undertake a trip down the Rhine and into Belgium and Luxembourg, immodest gourmandising, drinking to excess, sexual profligacy, and self-harm. This, followed by a starvation diet which may purge them of both their excess and their reason. Once Miriam’s body is released, they can begin their journey home. The father has chosen to fly them all out of Munich Airport so that they will not need to change planes, but when they reach Munich, the airport is socked in with heavy sleet and fog. So much so that their flight — indeed all flights — has been delayed interminably. And this is where we pick up the story with the brother narrating their current predicament interspersed with reflections on what has preceded that in the previous two weeks as well as earlier moments in the lives of Miriam, her brother and her father.

In the stateless state of those who have already passed through security at an international airport, grounded by the murky fog that paralyses airports and action, and faced with a constitutional ambivalence about his father, himself and everything else, we follow the brother’s not always trustworthy impressions. But ultimately nothing is clear or fully explained. An underlying sense of menace pervades but it has no clear source. Emotions are fractured and changeable. And perhaps the only moments of clarity come when the son speaks about the advent of twelve-tone music and especially the music of Alban Berg.

That singular break with tonality seems also to be the model for Baxter’s treatment of the novel. Not so much a case of anti-narrative as the abandonment of narrative, or rather narrative as the underpinning structure of the novel. Themes of death and excess cross against those of loss and abandonment or harm and self-harm. But there is no centre, per se, and so we are carried along solely by the power of Baxter’s prose itself. And what prose that is! I was transfixed. Constantly unsettled. And ultimately a bit in awe. This is a novel that warrants re-reading almost immediately. Highly recommended.½

I picked up this novel on a whim, knowing nothing about it. Usually, this ends badly for me, but this is the exception that will keep me bringing books home based solely on the cover and descriptions written on the dust jacket.

The nameless narrator and protagonist is in Germany, helping his father bring home the body of his sister, who has died in her apartment in Berlin. The narrative takes place entirely within a long fog delay at the Munich airport, and the format of the novel is that of one man narrating the wait with his frail father and the official from the American consulate in Berlin who has been guiding them through the process. His memories range back through his childhood to the weeks spent waiting in Berlin for his sister's body to be released by the coroner. The format makes the absence of quotation marks and the way the novel jumps around feel entirely natural; we are accompanying this man as he spends his hours in the airport with his father or walking aimlessly about, privy to his random thoughts and rising agitation.

Munich Airport feels a lot like Herman Koch's The Dinner, with a growing sense of something being wrong, although this is a much more restrained falling apart. The sister was troubled and distanced herself from her family, especially after her mother died. There were long stretches between encounters with her brother, making the changes in her stand out all the more. But the narrator has also been unsuccessful in many ways. He's in his forties, and despite a modest success in freelance consulting, he is remarkably unmoored to anyone.

This is not a cheerful novel, but it is a good one. And the way it's written gives it a forward momentum that kept me reading.½

The title of Greg Baxter's novel, Munich Airport (Twelve, $25), is also the setting for this novel-of-memory, concerned mostly with the pain of living. The unnamed narrator and his father are waiting in the Munich Airport for the weather to clear so that they can accompany the body of Miriam, the narrator's sister, back to the United States. Miriam's corpse was found in her Munich apartment, where she had starved herself to death. Her father and brother are struggling to come to terms with this form of suicide, searching unsuccessfully through what they know of her life to find a reason, but the narrator is also searching for a way to cope with pain that he has difficulty expressing. Very much a novel of the internal, Munich Airport is also a story about estrangement, whether emotional or geographic.

Reviewed in the Sacramento News & Review: http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/pain-of-living/content?oid=16277696

I have mixed feelings about this book. Certainly some of those feelings are quite negative. For example, the absence of quotation marks to designate speech seemed to me to make the structure somewhat clumsy and stop the smooth flow of narrative. For what gain? I wasn't that keen on the complete absence of chapters, either. Nor did I like the sudden changes between 'current' events and events remembered and retold, although I can see that there could be some justification for that structure and Baxter did a good job of making the reader aware when he had slipped into memory mode. What I did like was the exploration of father-son relationships and sibling relationships. Not that these were deeply explored, but rather they were obliquely observed with almost random snapshots of the family in various contexts. I also enjoyed the observations of the modern life of a man in the marketing business. As is often the case, I suspect there's a lot more to this book than I was able to take in, due to my feeble mind. Certainly, I could see that the main character was deeply troubled by the fact that his sister had starved herself to death and he hadn't been aware of her decline...and this is connected to the fact that he attempted to perform surgery on his own abdomen with a steak knife. The fact that both he and his father were sick and unable to eat as they waited for his sister's body to be loaded onto the plane was also clearly a response to the sister's death and their feelings of guilt. But I didn't understand the main character's reckless spending on clothes and luxury goods just as he prepared to catch the plane back to America. And I didn't understand the ending at all. Nonetheless, I was left with a distinct positive impression. I could really appreciate the fact that the sister had felt empowered by having the ability to control and suppress her appetite, and that empowerment ironically had death as its consequence. My own mother constantly talks about her desire to die - and that if she had sufficient courage she would stop eating and starve herself to death. She longs to take back control of her life in the same way the the sister did in this story.

Some really lovely writing here. Like a strange cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson. But it works.

We follow an unnamed American ex-Navy officer hoping to lose himself, or find himself, in an unnamed wintry eastern European city. We traverse the day and the city with him and his friend, Saskia, who is helping him search for an apartment. In the course of their travels we learn about art and the advent of perspective in western visual art, architecture and the monumental difference between the renaissance and the baroque, music and the glory that is Bach’s Chaconne and the curious sources for that quintessential western musical instrument, the violin, as well as the ballistics of billiards. Death surrounds them, whether in the form of Saskia’s dead parents, or Josephina, a friend of our protagonist’s youth, the numerous deliberate and calculated deaths in the war theatre that was Iraq, or even the cemetery that abuts the building where the long sought apartment resides. Death suffuses memory and supplants it. And it cannot be bargained with.

Despite the topics canvassed, the narrative never seems to leave the intimate surroundings of our protagonist. The pace is gentle. The tone almost elegiac. And there may also be a hint of something more, something that might be found in an unlooked for possibility of love. Or not. It is far from clear.

What is clear is that Greg Baxter is an author well worth attending to. Recommended.

I hear that this author has had at least one other book that was critically acclaimed. I'm critical, but I'm not going to "acclaim" it as something wonderful, because to me, it just wasn't. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood for this style of writing. Perhaps it has gone a the way of a lot of writers who can't get themselves motivated to identify those things within a book that are key to most readers. It was quite descriptive, but I wouldn't say it was compelling to me. It also really wasn't long enough. I read it in one day, and the day's not over yet. It's confusing. For a summer read for me, it didn't have the zip I expected. They talk about some violence in here, but it wasn't that violent to me. And all they did was talk around it. The writer has been compared to Virginia Woolf to some degree. I don't see it. I'll try reading it again another time, but for right now, it just wasn't my cuppa.

Intriguing and elegant.

This is a thought-provoking novel, modern in its form and content, but also timeless as the author muses about music (Brahms, European blues singers), art (the evolution of perspective), and Baroque architecture. It's the story of one day in an unnamed city in Europe, told by an unnamed narrator. Although there isn't a plot in the classic sense, the narrator's actions and thoughts as he tries to settle into a permanent life in this cold, gray city, as a new-found friend, Saskia, accompanies him, are fascinating. There is a sense of so much just beneath the surface which is what creates the tension. His quest for anonymity after a past working in Baghdad assigning "death from a distance" is compelling.

Interesting

"The Apartment" is a short novel with little plot and is as compelling as anything I've read in a long while. It begs to be read straight through. The precision of the prose and the structure, without a single break and with paragraphs that go on, make it hard to put down.

An unnamed American, forty-one years old, has come to an unnamed European city for unexplained reasons and has been living in a tiny, shabby hotel room. He has wandered the streets of the city for six weeks and had casual interactions with various people. He wants to stay, wants to disappear into the anonymity of this cold, wet, bustling place. On the one day that spans the novel, he looks for an apartment, with the help of Saskia, a much younger woman he met in a museum. There is suspense in the novel but it is not based on the outcome of the apartment search or on whether the companionable relationship with Saskia will become something more. It derives from a sense of the unknown and foreboding that hang over the character.

In flashbacks, we learn something about this man. He grew up in a small town in the desert, later lived near a football stadium in a city in the desert, served in the Navy on a submarine, did intelligence work in Iraq, then returned alone to Iraq as a private contractor, where he got rich as an information technology consultant. Is this then to be a war/anti-war story? A PTSD story? As he meets Saskia's friends over the course of the day, the potential for violence seems to be just below the surface.

“I worry that [Saskia] may find me too quiet or boring. I could fill the silence by talking about the past, but I try not to think about the past. For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret, a regret that was contemporaneous with experience, and sometimes preceded experience. Whenever I think of my past now I see a great black wave that has risen a thousand stories high and is suspended above me...”

The pleasures of “The Apartment” are not in the accumulation of incident but in the accumulation of detail: in descriptions of the city's transit system, the detour to buy an expensive coat, Christmas markets, parks, cafés, the smell of wet stone in every stairwell; in philosophical digressions on perspective in art, Baroque architecture, the perfection of a Bach chaconne, three-cushion billiards; and in the memories of the past that the narrator doesn't want to think about but which flood his thoughts. Extraordinary.

Very impressed with this story of a 40ish American who chooses on an impulsive to restart his life in a European city. The narrative flows through the day he sets out to find and moves into his own apartment, found with the help of a young local woman who has befriended him. It is full of flashbacks to many chapters of his previous life which (partly?) explain how he has arrived at this day and how he deals with his current condition. It leaves the reader with puzzles to chew on but a satisfying glimpse into a very real possible situation, symptomatic of 2013.