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Overview
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The Breaking of Eggs is the story of the curmudgeonly Feliks Zhokovski, Polish by birth, Communist at heart, who at age 61 finds that just about everything he has based his life on is crumbling. Separated from him family as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland, Feliks is currently living in Paris and his life's work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc. But unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991: the Berlin Wall has fallen, Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn't the economic miracle he wants it to be, and he's forced to confront the fact that his travel-writing days are numbered. His guide was a flourishing business, but the old pro-Communist descriptions won’t do, for Western visitors will now be able to see for themselves. So he makes the (extremely difficult) decision to sell his guide to a big, capitalist American publisher. This sets in motion a chain of events that will reunite him with a brother living in Ohio that he hasn't seen in fifty years, reveal the truth about the mother he thought abandoned him and offer him a second chance with a long-lost love.
Equal parts hilarious and moving, The Breaking of Eggs is the story of a man who closed himself off from everyone and everything years ago and now awakens to discover the world has changed dramatically and he must change with it. The Breaking of Eggs also has the added bonus of being a crash course in 20th century European history, subtly told as a backdrop to Feliks' riveting personal story. Imagine Everything is Illuminated meets The Elegance of the Hedgehog, then forget all the publishing clichés and discover this incredible new voice.
Synopsis
A debut novel unwinds the tangle of twentieth-century history with wit, humor, and humanity
61-year-old Feliks is a naturalized Frenchman, a displaced Pole and former Communist-and a curmudgeon-who has made his living writing a yearly travel guide to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. In 1991, with the Curtain now fallen, Feliks finds his beliefs beginning to crumble around him. When a rapacious American publisher offers to buy out his life's work, Feliks must travel to the country he has long despised, and so begins the wry and moving tale of a man who awakens from self-imposed isolation into a changed world he must get to know all over again. So unfolds a story of family, war, politics, a second chance at love, and one man's quest for himself.
Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
In this first novel from British author Powell, the sale of self-described leftist and ex-communist Feliks Zhukovski's life work, a travel guide to Eastern Europe, precipitates sweeping late-life changes.
The American company that offers Feliks a sumptuous sum for his guide won't be keeping him on in any sort of advisory capacity—his work reads like Eastern Bloc propaganda, and, as he sells the guide, the Soviet Union is becoming history. Feliks, oddly robotic and unemotional, is perpetually perplexed—a bachelor who seems never really to have experienced life, nor, as he realizes in his 60s as a chronic traveler, the concept of home, despite his having maintained an apartment in Paris. His first visit to America to sell his guide to a New York publishing house becomes an opportunity to meet a long-lost brother, Woodrow, from whom he was separated as a youth when their Polish mother shipped her sons off just as the Nazis prepared to invade. Fissures develop in Feliks' emotionless façade. He begins to entertain the possibility that his dislike of Capitalism and the West may not be as soundly founded as he had thought, and, overcome with emotion with regards to Woodrow and the fate of the mother they have been unable to locatefor 25 years, he undergoes a process of ideological apostasy. Back in Paris, with time and money on his hands, he obtains his mother's last address. He also pursues leads on the one bona fide romance of his long, dry life. The narrative's inertia and twists, not to mention Feliks' dry sense of humor superimposed against a geographical and historical backdrop, often make for funny and compelling reading. But Feliks' obsessive reassessment of his politics, spurred by realizations of the untruths and injustices on which they were based, slows to a sometimes sentimental picaresque populated by flat characters acting as foils for his interior monologue.
Raises questions butlacks satisfying conclusions, which is apparently the point.