the imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Tom Rachman's novel came out last April (2010) and was greeted by rave reviews (Read the NY Times Review).  I come across the book while skimming through the staff picks at Powells Books (where it also gets a great  review).  Written like a book of short stories, this book manages to weave itself together into a novel.  The story revolves around an aging international newspaper and the quirky characters that staff its Rome office.  Rachman's insight into human motivation, ambition, despair, and hunger for relationship is poignant.  With several chapters I stop, close the book, and just sit thinking about the powerful image with which I am left (like a good short story can do).  Consider one character's musings on ambition..

"I say ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall...Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition.  Whatever its ills, nothing has created more.  Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man."


Agree?  At the end of the day is this what motivates us?  Is it our own deep needs to be worshiped and adored by those around us?


The character goes on, "What I really fear is time.  That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales.  It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving.  There's that line of Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.'  That's right.  We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory.  Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories" (37).


Through Rachman's characters the author himself grieves the dying art of newsprint and mourns for the struggling journalist, but he does this through sometimes funny and quirky characters that will make you laugh or make you squirm with discomfort.  Like other great achievements of man the newspaper yields to the Internet Age reminding me of the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes,

I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

In the end Rachman's characters leave a piercing picture of the folly of human ambition at the expense of relationship.  All kingdoms men build to their own glory will come to an end.  What is our true desire?  To love and be loved, to know and be known.  Yet how many of us sacrifice relationship to the altars of ambition? Each character in the imperfectionists is crying out for human connection and relationship, and yet they struggle in the work that those relationships take.  The book leaves you wondering, "What am I pursuing in life?  Is it the things that matter?  Or things that are merely passing away...?."