It is beautifully written, as John Green says, sentence-to-sentence.
The Last Flight of Poxl West weaves together two voices: Elijah Goldstein and Poxl West. Poxl West, Eli's uncle, publishes his World War II memoir Skylock to great acclaim and success. Fifteen-year-old Eli worships his uncle Poxl.
Amazon says it is a memoir within a memoir within a novel.
The book alternates between excerpts of Poxl's memoir and a grown Eli retelling his youth.
"And write about it he did. Each time he finished a new chapter he would take me somewhere new and recount to me his finest similies, the clearest arisen memory, the complicated feeling that arose as he remembered things he'd obviously spent most of his adulthood trying to forget - all for the sake of literature. For the sake of those who came after him. We talked about the fact that this is why men wrote: to leave behind their stories for those who would come years later."
It is a beautiful book about storytelling.
My favorite parts of the book are the references to Shakespeare:
"He who had been my enemy was now my friend. This was a lesson I would recognize often in the days to come. While in the pages of Othello we may feel we understand a character like Iago, when we meet him in life, he retains the capacity for change. He's not cut off from the obviation of his sins. If Othello had spared Desdemona and himself, surely he and Iago could have met in some new circumstance in their later years. There would have been memories to hash out, confessions to be made - the great dissembler would have had to try not to dissemble for once, to speak and be heard after his great sins had been unveiled. But couldn't they have been as Navigator Smith and I now were?"
"But maybe it was up until that moment, no matter what we'd done, we'd assumed we were like the vast majority of men - like Lear himself - self judged to be more sinned against than sinning. Now something was changing in both of us the more Smith talked. As I say, if you met him in life, years later, even Iago might have turned from his role. But it could work the other way, as well, couldn't it? That line from The Merchant of Venice had crossed my mind many times in the years since Glynnis's mother and I first read it: 'If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?' Somehow I'd thought quite clearly that this line had been uttered by one of Shakespeare's great villains, not one of his great heroes."
"When I read Hamlet in my thirties, studying it in earnest and reading it for the first time since I'd encountered it in the cave with Mrs. Goldring, I came to find that there is a disagreement among Shakespeare scholars over the nature of the ghost of his father, King Hamlet, who visits him throughout the play. Some believe it is meant to be staged as a physical manifestation: The supernatural has occurred. A ghost has set foot onstage. The Tragedy of Hamlet, in this staging, is the original ghost story. But other scholars believe that it is simply a manifestation of Hamlet's guilt, the most famous indecision in all of literature: the question of whether Hamlet will act. There is no such thing as a ghost; there is only such thing as Hamlet's hallucination. To tell a tale, Hamlet famously says, is to "hold a mirror up to nature," and in the mirror we will never see the face of the dead. It is only our own image we see."
The praise for The Last Flight of Poxl West goes something like this...
"A richly layered, beautifully told, and somehow lovable story about war, revenge, and loss. A book about what we make of our heroes, and what our heroes make of us."
Keep the poem Why The Novel Is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read by Marie Howe in mind as you read this book:
Why The Novel Is Necessary but
Sometimes Hard to Read
It happens in time. Years passed until the old woman,
one snowy morning, realized she had never loved her daughter...
Or, Five years later she answered the door, and her suitor had returned
almost unrecognizable from his journeys...
But before you get to that part you have to learn the names
you have to suffer not knowing anything about anyone
and slowly come to understand who each of them is, or who each of them
imagines him or her self to be -
and then, because you are the reader, you must try to understand who
you think each of them is because of who you believe yourself to be
in relation to their situation
or to your memory of one very much like it.
Oh it happens in time and time is hard to live through.
I can't read anything anymore, my dying brother said one afternoon,
not even letters. Come on, Come on, he said, waving his hand in the air,
What am I interested in - plot?
You come upon the person the author put there
as if you'd been pushed into a room and told to watch the dancing-
pushed into parties, into basements, across moors, into
the great drawing rooms of great cities, into the small cold cabin, or
to here, beside the small running river where a boy is weeping,
and no one comes,
and you have to watch without saying anything he can hear.
One by one the readers come and watch him weeping by the river,
and he never knows,
unless he too has read the story where a boy feels himself all alone.
This is the life you have written, the novel tells us. What happens next?
The Last Flight of Poxl West is a wonderful book with a thought-provoking final surprise.
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