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History: The Home Movie
A thoughtful and masterful novel in verse by an innovative 20th-century poet.
One of England’s foremost poets, Craig Raine offers a “bold, ambitious chronicle of life” ( New York Times Review ) told through the stories of two families, the Pasternaks and the Raines, who touch each other and are touched by history in different ways. Like a home movie, this novel in verse masterfully conjures the world in which these families move by re-creating the texture of ordinary and extraordinary life. Blending fact, fiction, and thrilling leaps of imagination, The Home Movie promises to be the film you’ll ever read.
“Craig Raine’s History admirably reclaims poetry’s narrative function, its capacity to fictionally propose a world as complex and mysterious as reality itself. A challenging, innovative, and unsettling novel in verse.”— Los Angeles Times
“A sly, surprising, brilliant, and yes, readable book.”— Boston Phoenix
One of England’s foremost poets, Craig Raine offers a “bold, ambitious chronicle of life” ( New York Times Review ) told through the stories of two families, the Pasternaks and the Raines, who touch each other and are touched by history in different ways. Like a home movie, this novel in verse masterfully conjures the world in which these families move by re-creating the texture of ordinary and extraordinary life. Blending fact, fiction, and thrilling leaps of imagination, The Home Movie promises to be the film you’ll ever read.
“Craig Raine’s History admirably reclaims poetry’s narrative function, its capacity to fictionally propose a world as complex and mysterious as reality itself. A challenging, innovative, and unsettling novel in verse.”— Los Angeles Times
“A sly, surprising, brilliant, and yes, readable book.”— Boston Phoenix
- GenresPoetry
336 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1994
2 people are currently reading
36 people want to read
About the author
Craig Raine
81 books46 followersPoet and critic Craig Raine was born on 3 December 1944 in Bishop Auckland, England, and read English at Exeter College, Oxford.
He lectured at Exeter College (1971-2), Lincoln College, Oxford, (1974-5), and Christ Church, Oxford, (1976-9), and was books editor for New Review (1977-8), editor of Quarto (1979-80), and poetry editor at the New Statesman (1981). Reviews and articles from this period are collected in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990). He became poetry editor at the London publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and became a fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1991. He gained a Cholmondeley Award in 1983 and the Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award in 1998. He is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté.
His poetry collections include the acclaimed The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984) and History: The Home Movie (1994), an epic poem that celebrates the history of his own family and that of his wife. His libretto The Electrification of the Soviet Union (1986) is based on The Last Summer, a novella by Boris Pasternak. Collected Poems 1978-1999 was published in 1999. A new long poem A la recherche du temps perdu, an elegy to a former lover, and a collection of his reviews and essays, entitled In Defence of T. S. Eliot, were both published in 2000. Another collection of essays, More Dynamite, appeared in 2013.
Craig Raine lives in Oxford. His latest books are How Snow Falls (2010), a new poetry collection; and two novels, Heartbreak (2010), and The Divine Comedy (2012).
He lectured at Exeter College (1971-2), Lincoln College, Oxford, (1974-5), and Christ Church, Oxford, (1976-9), and was books editor for New Review (1977-8), editor of Quarto (1979-80), and poetry editor at the New Statesman (1981). Reviews and articles from this period are collected in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet (1990). He became poetry editor at the London publishers Faber and Faber in 1981, and became a fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1991. He gained a Cholmondeley Award in 1983 and the Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award in 1998. He is founder and editor of the literary magazine Areté.
His poetry collections include the acclaimed The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), A Free Translation (1981), Rich (1984) and History: The Home Movie (1994), an epic poem that celebrates the history of his own family and that of his wife. His libretto The Electrification of the Soviet Union (1986) is based on The Last Summer, a novella by Boris Pasternak. Collected Poems 1978-1999 was published in 1999. A new long poem A la recherche du temps perdu, an elegy to a former lover, and a collection of his reviews and essays, entitled In Defence of T. S. Eliot, were both published in 2000. Another collection of essays, More Dynamite, appeared in 2013.
Craig Raine lives in Oxford. His latest books are How Snow Falls (2010), a new poetry collection; and two novels, Heartbreak (2010), and The Divine Comedy (2012).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 27, 2017
One of the things I learned to think about somewhere in the route of my education was the struggle between form and content. Perhaps today the only way a writer can write with forms is to have a heightened awareness of that tension, a simultaneous appreciation of the possibilities and recognition of the limitations of a formal structure. It is, in a sense, the same irony played with by hipster pop culture.
The book I just finished, Craig Raines’ History: The Home Movie, is an early exploration of this inherently postmodern tension. I have to be honest: I wasn’t sure who Craig Raines was when I started the book. I have no way of knowing whether I was aware of him when the book landed on my reading list many years ago, though I suspect I was either simply intrigued by the concept of a family history told in a book-length collection of poems, or the jazzy jacket blurb caught my attention: “. . . Rape. The Russian Revolution. German inflation. Murder. Masturbation (mutual and solo). . .” I mean, really. Who wouldn’t want to read that?
I’ve since come to understand that Raine was a major influencer in the world of poetry at the end of the 20th century, deciding public tastes through his job as an editor at Faber & Faber. I also found out that I was familiar with one of his most famous poems: the one spoken in the point of view of an alien visiting Earth.
Some critics fault History for using a similar conceit–forcing the intimately familiar into a lens that makes it almost unrecognizable–to an untenable end. At times I think this is true. To carry the metaphor further, some poems seem so “othered” that, when reading them, I felt I was looking at the world through a glass that was heavily smudged and smoked. Occasionally, I would see a shape, and think: was that an elbow? A knee? A shoulder?
Don’t get me wrong; I never sensed that Raine was being willfully obscurist, exactly. Willfully obtuse, maybe, but in the same way we sense we almost know the people who pop up in our family histories. He draws scenes and characters which are almost familiar, but not quite. Something always controverts true familiarity. This something is certainly not abstraction or forced diversion, as is often the case in a lot of poems being written now. If anything, as others have noted, it’s easy for the reader to feel overwhelmed by Raines’ gourmand sense of detail. It often seems superfluous; some of it is wordplay; all of it gives a certain confidence that the narrative voice is immersed in the world of which it speaks.
And still, there’s a peculiar restraint, creating the earlier noted tension between form and content. If we can allow content to include both language and, for lack of a better word, “plot”, then it’s fair to say that it’s no wonder the book is over 300 pages long, with all it has to work with. The aforementioned points in the blurb, set in the episodic stories of the Raine and the Pasternak families (yes, those Pasternaks) in England, Russia and various sites in between. And yet the sweep of human experience is harnessed by Raines’ adherence to a more or less consistent form from beginning to end: stanzas of three lines (they don’t feel consistently tight enough for me to think of them as tercets), and lines of approximately 3-5 feet. They aren’t regular, but they do form a reliable lattice.
The tension this builds works better in some poems than in others. For instance, there’s the early, brutal poem about a wartime rape, “1917: Garden Square, Oxford” which allows the restraint to mirror the way a woman in the poem must control herself as she is being raped in the basement while her children are upstairs. The tone created by the form placed around this content feels uncomfortably like dissociation, with an eery calm superimposed over emotional chaos.
Another poem where the tension becomes instrumental in effectiveness is “1925: The General Kills Himself”, with stanzas like this:
He has cut his throat
with a bone-handled kitchen knife
right through the trachea,
only to then change his mind
and dash from door to door
his head in his hands,
till somebody came. Queenie.
“Musha misha juggler.”
He gargles his words.
“don’t talk. Norman, get Dr. Wade.”
He sits on her kitchen chair,
bleeding and swallowing blood,
his breath a delicate slur
like the slur of the whetstone
he used to sharpen the knife.
Through the blind blinking wound,
the windpipe at work.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
In passages like these, the language is almost pedestrian, but it has to be, since the subject matter is so sensational. All of the book plays with this balance between the understated and the overstated, restraint and extravagance.
Is it interesting? Yes, sometimes. But other than in a few poems, including the ones mentioned, I’m not sure an interesting tension is enough for resonance. And that’s a shame, because Raine is attempting to make some of the most resonant moments in both European and family history sing. He takes the grand sweep and brings it to a human level, but by shrinking it that much he reveals a lot of dust on the lens.
The book I just finished, Craig Raines’ History: The Home Movie, is an early exploration of this inherently postmodern tension. I have to be honest: I wasn’t sure who Craig Raines was when I started the book. I have no way of knowing whether I was aware of him when the book landed on my reading list many years ago, though I suspect I was either simply intrigued by the concept of a family history told in a book-length collection of poems, or the jazzy jacket blurb caught my attention: “. . . Rape. The Russian Revolution. German inflation. Murder. Masturbation (mutual and solo). . .” I mean, really. Who wouldn’t want to read that?
I’ve since come to understand that Raine was a major influencer in the world of poetry at the end of the 20th century, deciding public tastes through his job as an editor at Faber & Faber. I also found out that I was familiar with one of his most famous poems: the one spoken in the point of view of an alien visiting Earth.
Some critics fault History for using a similar conceit–forcing the intimately familiar into a lens that makes it almost unrecognizable–to an untenable end. At times I think this is true. To carry the metaphor further, some poems seem so “othered” that, when reading them, I felt I was looking at the world through a glass that was heavily smudged and smoked. Occasionally, I would see a shape, and think: was that an elbow? A knee? A shoulder?
Don’t get me wrong; I never sensed that Raine was being willfully obscurist, exactly. Willfully obtuse, maybe, but in the same way we sense we almost know the people who pop up in our family histories. He draws scenes and characters which are almost familiar, but not quite. Something always controverts true familiarity. This something is certainly not abstraction or forced diversion, as is often the case in a lot of poems being written now. If anything, as others have noted, it’s easy for the reader to feel overwhelmed by Raines’ gourmand sense of detail. It often seems superfluous; some of it is wordplay; all of it gives a certain confidence that the narrative voice is immersed in the world of which it speaks.
And still, there’s a peculiar restraint, creating the earlier noted tension between form and content. If we can allow content to include both language and, for lack of a better word, “plot”, then it’s fair to say that it’s no wonder the book is over 300 pages long, with all it has to work with. The aforementioned points in the blurb, set in the episodic stories of the Raine and the Pasternak families (yes, those Pasternaks) in England, Russia and various sites in between. And yet the sweep of human experience is harnessed by Raines’ adherence to a more or less consistent form from beginning to end: stanzas of three lines (they don’t feel consistently tight enough for me to think of them as tercets), and lines of approximately 3-5 feet. They aren’t regular, but they do form a reliable lattice.
The tension this builds works better in some poems than in others. For instance, there’s the early, brutal poem about a wartime rape, “1917: Garden Square, Oxford” which allows the restraint to mirror the way a woman in the poem must control herself as she is being raped in the basement while her children are upstairs. The tone created by the form placed around this content feels uncomfortably like dissociation, with an eery calm superimposed over emotional chaos.
Another poem where the tension becomes instrumental in effectiveness is “1925: The General Kills Himself”, with stanzas like this:
He has cut his throat
with a bone-handled kitchen knife
right through the trachea,
only to then change his mind
and dash from door to door
his head in his hands,
till somebody came. Queenie.
“Musha misha juggler.”
He gargles his words.
“don’t talk. Norman, get Dr. Wade.”
He sits on her kitchen chair,
bleeding and swallowing blood,
his breath a delicate slur
like the slur of the whetstone
he used to sharpen the knife.
Through the blind blinking wound,
the windpipe at work.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
In passages like these, the language is almost pedestrian, but it has to be, since the subject matter is so sensational. All of the book plays with this balance between the understated and the overstated, restraint and extravagance.
Is it interesting? Yes, sometimes. But other than in a few poems, including the ones mentioned, I’m not sure an interesting tension is enough for resonance. And that’s a shame, because Raine is attempting to make some of the most resonant moments in both European and family history sing. He takes the grand sweep and brings it to a human level, but by shrinking it that much he reveals a lot of dust on the lens.
June 29, 2016
History: The Home Movie is a rich and far-reaching attempt both to tell the story of a family and to chronicle the events of a century and a continent in a poem as long as a novel. For me - and as poetry demands so much of the reader, I found it hard to tell whether any failures I found were mine or the poet's - it was a qualified success. History works on several levels. At the micro level (that of individual words, phrases, and images), the book is bursting with invention. Raine is a master of the miniature and his metaphors are almost always innovative (although one condom simile is surely enough!), sometimes beautiful ("the harp of the rain"; bare floorboards "grained like smoked salmon"), often arresting (the "brief cauliflower" of champagne bursting on the bows of a ship; lipstick making "a segment of blood orange" on a glass), and memorably striking even when their subject is banal ("the loofah's shredded wheat"). At the opposite, super-macro level, the poem is a powerful evocation of the sweep of history. Things get murkier in between, though. The individual constituent poems are a mixed bag: some absorb and entrance; some demand to be re-read before they reveal themselves; and some baffle, exasperate, and resist. Where the poems intersect and weave together - the macro level, the level of narrative, where we might expect the book to come closest to being a novel - there is more confusion than coherence; I kept turning back to the family tree at the beginning in search of clarification and connection, and rarely got it. I am sure that there is more to be got from this book: it needs to be read more than once, and I will re-read it... but not just yet.
February 5, 2017
Oh man. I had quite a bad reading experience with this book, though in all fairness, that might be much more to do with the weird mental block I've had this month, coupled with my insistence to not juggle more than two books at a time and the Star Wars rabbit-hole down which my brain has fallen, courtesy of Rogue One.
The very ambitious scope of this book didn't help my quite distracted reading, which I grabbed in moments over the last month, and as a result I couldn't really get a handle on the narrative or the sprawling family trees, particularly paired with a lot historical and cultural references, not all of which I was familiar with.
There were some stunning turns of phrase and images though - the surface of a pond resembling mint sauce, or a wheelchair as an ampersand. Will definitely re-read in future, when my head's a bit less jumbled.
The very ambitious scope of this book didn't help my quite distracted reading, which I grabbed in moments over the last month, and as a result I couldn't really get a handle on the narrative or the sprawling family trees, particularly paired with a lot historical and cultural references, not all of which I was familiar with.
There were some stunning turns of phrase and images though - the surface of a pond resembling mint sauce, or a wheelchair as an ampersand. Will definitely re-read in future, when my head's a bit less jumbled.
Read
June 5, 2014I cant really rate this, as piece of writing I totally admire this, the sheer volume of work that must have gone into it- stunning, and the tales of the entwined families joyous. However some of the actual poems didn't work for me.
In awe of the work as a whole though.
In awe of the work as a whole though.
Read
October 8, 2015Utterly Unrateable.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews