In Babylon

by Marcel Möring

Book Overview

Winner of two major European prizes, this funny, quirky chronicle of a family of Dutch clockmakers is a bestseller in the Netherlands.

Sixty-year-old Nathan Hollander is stranded in a winter blizzard with his young niece, Nina, in the deserted house of his late Uncle Herman. As they wait for the weather to improve, Nathan tells Nina the story of their forefathers - a family of clockmakers who came to the Netherlands from Eastern Europe and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0006551041
• ISBN13: 9780006551041
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Flamingo
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A letter of Admiration to Marcel Möring

Dear Sir, For this letter to make any amount of sense, it must be read as if you are, in fact, Marcel Möring. I'm not sure if you are, or if this email address is just an address to a webmaster of sorts. I feel an overpowering need to tell you how much I loved your book, In Babylon. In all honesty, I picked it up, a few years ago, simply because of it's cover. "Hey, what's this..." I said to it, as I spun it in my hands, the hardback edition is so beautiful, what with it's uneven pages jetting out like a collection of feathers. I have seen other countries editions, mine is with the greenish-gray background with the tower of books climbing upwards to a hovering pendulum. A pocket watch splayed open, displaying 3:16, rests, forgotten on a step of binding. A very handsome book indeed. Who says you can't judge such a thing by it's cover? The story packed within, beginning with the unsightly death of Uncle Herman alongside an all-too-young girl. To the Hollander home, haunted by objects and memories, cluttered with books and canned food and cold as death, trapped by snow and time itself, sabotaged by ghosts and memories of them. To Adolf Hitler screeching through the speaker of an old radio "There was a horrible noise coming through the radio. It sounded as if there was a kobold inside, a small, hideous creature hopping up and down on skinny little legs, steaming with rage. Every few minutes the voice coming from the Comedia would reach a shrill crescendo and the gnome would bite off the words that rolled out of his mouth. As if he were spewing out a long string of sausages and every so often, ranting and raving, would snap one off."To America. New York. New Mexico. Back to Europe, across all of it and time as well. Back to Holland, back to that frozen house where time stands still until it bursts again. Sending the narrator, Nathan, on a dizzying hunt to find the origins of everything that is Hollander, everything that is him. The characters you've created, sultry Nina with her fire-like hair, her fire-like wit. The mythical Zeno with his oversized enigma and undersized stature. The elusive Magnus, hiding from his own memory, which in turn fuels Nathan's. Such and array. And the food you describe excites me. I am a chef, and hearing Nathan concoct what he could, with what he was given and the description and selection of wine sent shivers of delight up my spine. Stories packed within stories telling stories themselves in just the way they are strung together, what connects them to eachother, and even, as is the case with the Fairy Tales, what keeps them seemingly apart. You ought to know you have written my all time favorite book, one which I have already purchased as gifts for others and talked more than a few into buying themselves, always the handsome hardback, I insist. And I wonder, repeatedly, how different it might be in Dutch, I wonder if I would like it more or less, I wonder how it sounds to you in English and how it might sound t

rich stories of life without a home

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said "the universe is composed of stories - not atoms", and you can't escape that with this book. "In Babylon" is filled with stories pulling you along, stories strung together in an unconvential way, the effect more like a densely woven mat than a pretty necklace.The theme is announced right on the dedication page: "Trees have roots. Jews have legs." Möring's protagonist, writer of fairy tales Nathan Hollander, tells the story of his family, Jews, always on the way, traveling West. It begins with the clockmaker Magnus Levie, from the area bordering Poland and Lithuania, who starts his trek to the West in 1648, after finding the house of his uncle Chaim burned down by Cossacks, his uncle presumably murdered. After twenty years of wandering he shows up in Holland, in what is its prosperous Golden Age, and finds a welcome there and a place to settle, and he assumes the name Hollander. The trek West is then interrupted for eight generations, all clockmakers in Rotterdam, physicists, engineers. Holland, poignantly characterized as the land of milk and butter, with its biblical echoes of "land overflowing of milk and honey", is almost the promised land, but not quite.In 1939 Nathan's dad, mom and uncle Herman set ship to America, to escape Hitler and the "Teutonic hordes", without being able to convince their parents to come with them. What I admire in Möring's account of this history is that there is no trace of any attempt to evoke compassion, instead he leaves you with complete respect for how each of these people dealt with the circumstances they found themselves in.What I consider to be the weakest part of the book is the backbone story, the story in which all the other stories find their connection. What will happen with Nathan and Nina, who find themselves stuck in an unusually severe winter in a remote house without heat, who need to keep alive by hacking antique furniture to pieces and burning it? Who had previously stacked that furniture tightly in the staircase well, and why? As the mystery that needs to pull you along suffiently to get you to read all the other stories it doesn't work very well - fortunately those other stories are strong enough and cohesive enough to do just fine without needing this central mystery.Nathan has trouble settling anywhere, and to trust others. Möring draws this sharply and contrasts it with the life of Magnus who after his wanderings of twenty years is able to find a home in the world. Will Nathan eventually succeed in this too? Can he overcome his distrust? That is the central tension that keeps him going.Nathan explains his personal inability to grow roots from the history of his family or that of Jews in general - and this is what keeps his inability in place. How Möring himself sees this is less clear to me.Well worth reading, if only for his portrayal of Holland by a deliberate outsider. Dutch expatriates, like me, will be able to identify with that very well. A

well-written, well-translated, strange...

I'm perplexed by my own reaction to this book. I confess that I didn't find the story particularly compelling. The minor mystery that is the glue binding together lots of narrative time-travel is treated as just that: minor, and I had a hard time becoming overly concerned with what was at the bottom of the apparent plot to very carefully NOT kill Nathan Hollander. I also had a very difficult time sympathizing with any of the characters, major or minor. Usually this is true because of poor character development; in this case, the characters are developed well, but I just don't particularly care for them. (Which isn't to say that Nathan is an anti-hero. He's not troubling enough for that.)So, then, why do I care enough to give a positive review? First, the writing is extraordinary, and this English translation left me breathless at times. It can be difficult to say that about a translation, but Stacey Knecht either took a great number of liberties, worked closely with Moring, or is absolutely brilliant. Regardless, the writing was appropriate, idiomatic, and comfortable. Without resorting to Nabokovian over-description, Moring communicates sense of place and time (several places and times, really). It reminds me of the stripped-down prose of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in that regard. I felt the cold and craved the tobacco without having it force-fed to me.Back to the "problems" I note at the beginning of this review. I'm not sure they are problems. Sometimes when I have trouble with a book is this well executed, I have to suspect the shortcoming is on my end, that perhaps I'm missing the literary or thematic nuances. And so it is with In Babylon. I think I'll give it a second read to see what I was misunderstanding. It's certainly worth a first read for anyone.

Very orginal strange story that will haunt you for weeks...

The story begins when Nathan Hollander and his niece Nina go to visit the house he has just inherited from an uncle. As they arrive, it starts snowing, but what is to come is more than just a little snow. They enter the house and find most of the house to be stacked with furniture, the entrance to most of the house is blocked. Meanwhile, the snowstorm outside gets worse, and before they know it, it's too late to leave, they are snowed in. Trying to make the best of their misfortune, they search those parts of the house they can still enter for food, and to their amazement, they find large amounts of food in the basement. But who put that food there? The dates show it cannot have been sticked more than 6 months ago, when their uncle has been dead for a much longer time. As the temperature keeps falling, Nathan and Nina start burning the furniture to keep warm, while Nathan, a fantastic storyteller, starts telling his niece the history of their family of clockmakers. What do they discover as they clear their path further into the house and go back and forth between history and present, and what is wrong with this house? Marcel Moring has an intriguing way of storytelling, which he shows through Nathan as well. This book becomes stranger and creepier as you get along, and it will leave you thinking about the story and further discovering how odd it was weeks after you finish it. The book has quite a number of pages, and there's a lot to think about, so take your time to read it, but I promise you won't regret reading In Babylon.

try this one

First of all if you don't like big books don't read this one, it is a big one and it needs your attention since the author is always jumping from past to present, but it is a very good book. Möring has his own one af a kind way to write it. I find his style somewhat related to the one off Virginia Andrews, you start reading and you just want to know what is happining on the next page. A small contence, Nathan Hollander gets snowed in with his niece in a big old house he inherited from his uncle Herman. Nathan is a writer, he writes fairytales, and uncle Herman never liked it that much, he gave his house to Nathan on the condition that Nathan would wright a sort of biograpy, the live of Herman Hollander. When Möring starts to write the past it is in fact how Nathan remembers it all, how it happened. I really liked this book and if I found any more by Möring I would read it for sure, if it is as good as this one. I don't know how you can classify this book, I mean Stephen King writes thrillers. But is this a thriller, a fairytail, or even a lovestory that never happened, if you want to know you have to read it yourself.