Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury

Doctor Criminale Reviews

• 
  Dayna

  I cannot remember exact details about this book (even though I read it not too long ago) but I know that I enjoyed it. I chose it out of a lengthy list of books to write a term paper over because my professor kept talking about what a funny book it was. I am so glad that I chose it because a) it was very entertaining for a book that I had to write a term paper over and b) I think that writing on Doctor Criminale is what got me an "A" in that class! Apparently my professor had been friends with Bradbury. She (my professor) said that this book was semi-autobiographical, and that she was the inspiration for one of the female characters in the book. She didn't tell me any of this until after I had read it and written a brilliant paper over it ... so I am glad that I genuinely liked it and had written favorably about it ... otherwise she probably would have failed me.
  
  It's about this young journalist named Francis Jay who is looking for (or just digging up dirt on) one Doctor Bazlo Criminale for a BBC special program. Criminale apparently played both sides during the Cold War and seemed to come out all right on top. Through Francis' adventure Bradbury writes (satirizing I guess) about post-Cold War politics and attitudes.
  
  In case you are wondering what class I read this for was about: it was the history of Eastern Europe and what Westerner's mistakenly refer to as "the Balkans." My professor was (and is) a Bulgarian obsessed with her job and correcting history. That is, correcting the Western version of Cold War history not from the perspective of either Communist or Defector ... but simply as a witness. I'm not sure how she manages to stay objective but she was a great professor and so she made sense.
  
  Read this book if you're interested in a fictional but still believable depiction of the post-Cold War world.
• 
  Brion Hutton

  I had to think about this novel for quite a few days before I was able to form even a preliminary opinion. Needless to say, the book created conflicting impressions in my mind, in part because Bradbury is hanging so many (so many!) weighty issues and themes on such a flimsy plot structure. He deals with the past, present, and future of politics, society, philosophy, art, and human consciousness in a almost slight story whose premise revolves around the pre-production research for an English TV biography of a world-famous philosopher and writer that turns into a semi-obsession for our journalist protagonist.
  
  Francis jay, said protagonist, is the least-well-drawn of the many otherwise colorfully entertaining and enlightening characters (particularly the philosopher's past and current wives and lovers) that appear somewhat sequentially throughout. Jay is not colorful by his own admission, nor is he particularly entertaining; he is, in fact, too credulous and a bit boring. He primarily serves as a blank canvas on which the other characters can paint their complex worldviews. He does claim to learn and grow from such encounters throughout the course of the novel, and he continually and coherently recounts the lessons imparted, but this claim sounds somewhat false. He remains such a bland, passive, neutral character that is hard to see why he sleeps with so many of the beautiful women that populate the novel. One or two ambiguous actions at the end of the story indicate some maturation by Jay, but perhaps the ambiguity arises from my lack of comprehension of the author's over-arching theme. There is growth here in understanding, but so much of that understanding concerns the ambiguity of human history, society, and reality that perhaps it is appropriate that the main character becomes more ambiguous in his actions as he gains insight. As I said, this one is going to take awhile to sink in completely as the ideas presented are complex and nebulous.
  
  Speaking of complex and nebulous, the best character is the enigma at the center of the novel, the philosopher Bazlo Criminale. Of somewhat uncertain east-European origins, he has achieved fame in both the east and the west as a profound philosopher, brilliant author, friend of the famous and powerful, and an advisor to governments and institutions worldwide. He has successfully straddled the cold-war divide, but are there secrets in his past? What compromises did he have to make to achieve his unique position in the world?
  
  Jay's encounters with Criminale are the most rewarding and entertaining parts of the book, and more, or at least longer, encounters would have shored up the novel considerably. Bradbury does such a good job of putting words in Criminale's mouth that this reader had no trouble accepting the character as the leading intellectual of the modern age. Perhaps someone more cognizant of post-modernist philosophy would disagree. How much of my conviction is ignorance and credulousness and how much the result of the author's craft, I can't say. Interesting topic for a discussion: The Credulous Reader.
  
  All in all, I really enjoyed this book despite some drawbacks, and I believe I will be thinking about some of the ideas it presented for quite some time. I can confidently recommend it to anyone who enjoys a modern european novel with quite a few intellectual aspirations. Also, the writing can be very bright and inventive at times, both in dialogue and description. I leave you with Bradbury's description, or rather lack thereof, of a (perhaps) sexual encounter with a woman:
  
  "In any case, the fact is that most sex in stories is only for the children anyway. Adults know perfectly well what happens in such cases, when anything happens at all. There is ordinariness, and something exceptional. There is talk, there is silence. There is pleasure, there is disappointment. There is attachment, there is separateness. There is self, and loss of it. There is thought, there is rest. There is being, there is nothingness. There is the room here, the bigger world out there. There is growing up, and staying the same. These are issues the philosophers usually discuss for us, or they did when we had any. And if they had troubles with such matters, why should I or anyone else do better? In any case, surely, even in this tolerant, permissive, late, liberal, over-investigated world of ours, we all have a right to occasional silence."
• 
  Stephen Coates

  In the introduction, the narrator recounts that a university lecturer had proved to me conclusively that all literature had been written by the wrong people, of the wrong class, race and gender, for entirely the wrong reasons. I'd read this quote in one of the papers as part of a class when I was at uni, so I bought and read the book with recounts the narrator's pursuit of and attempts to interview and thus profile Doctor Criminale, an academic with almost mystical stature in whatever field he was in. It was an enjoyable read, for one who reads little fiction, although the ending was a little drawn out.
• 
  Susan Katz

  I can't even begin to think of what category to select for this book, other than fiction. It's a weird book that I want to have read, but I don't really want to read. I gave it 140 pages (out of 340), which is way more than I typically give a book that I'm not enjoying, but I just kept waiting for it to get better or for something interesting to happen! It got good reviews, but it's just not for me. I can't even think of anyone to pass it on to, so I'll just give it to the library!
• 
  Rosejane

  
  
  not finish but i like here words:
  playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer
• 
  Mikhail Yukhnovskiy

  Not the best, but quotable:
  
  There are no travelers now, only tourists. A traveler comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist only comes to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.
• 
  Oksana73

  Роман длинный, неспешный, вдумчивый. Читать его надо очень внимательно, никуда не торопясь, получая удовольствие от стиля автора. Вот только для меня в конце этого удовольствия стало слишком много:). Мне стало немного скучно.
• 
  Gwen

  Maybe a little dated (c. 1992). But an interesting view of the postmodern Europe from an early 1990's perspective.
• 
  Kenneth

  I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
  
  http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11940385