The Breaking Of Eggs

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Reviewed By Toni Whitmont, Booktopia Buzz Editor
Last April Weidenfeld & Nicolson paid a six-figure sum for the world publishing rights for the literary debut, The Breaking of Eggs, by Jim Powell. I don’t know whether the six figures was closer to $US100,000 or $900,000 but having spent a day or two reading it last weekend, I reckon they got a bargain.

Powell starts his story with restraint and a fair degree of dry humour. Enough to whet the appetite for something that is so much more than another quirky novel with an unusual setting for this is really a book about the barriers and restraints of a life led in principle.

The year is 1991 and 61-year-old Feliks Zhukowski, an expatriate Pole who lives in Paris, finds himself in a crumbling world. Having escaped the war and joined the Communist party in France, he has lived his life virtually alone, eking out a living with his travel guides to eastern bloc countries, countries which reflect his own hopes and ideals. Now the unthinkable has happened. The Berlin Wall has come down, and an American company wants to take over and modernize his precious publications.

So what is it like to look around and suddenly discover that everything that you once held dear and true is suddenly dissolving? This is a question that vast numbers of people must have wrestled with in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The question leads Zhukowski to revisit his past, to re-evaluate the circumstances under which his mother sent him and his brother away in August of 1939, to re-engage with a woman who at one time held the secret to a life of shared happiness, to pick apart his long held beliefs about life, love, politics and well, everything. And what does he discover? That truth is not holding a set of values but experiencing things for oneself. That rationality is the product not of something neutral, but of our own experiences and emotions.

Powell’s special talent is to shrink major themes of the twentieth century to the canvas of just one figure, for through Zhukowski we see history writ small. At the same time, we get an exploration of the nature of connection, home, and exile. High-minded stuff but don’t be put off. This novel is not polemic. These questions bubble up through the very engaging story of Zhukowski’s shedding of his past.

Its publishers are likening The Breaking of Eggs to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian with touches of the film Goodbye Lenin. Fair enough. Bernard Schlink’s The Reader gets a mention too. It put me in mind of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Be that as it may, The Breaking of Eggs is really all its own. It is going to appeal to fans of both commercial and literary fiction and we are all going to be hearing a lot more about it. And if you are in a reading group – look no further. It will keep the discussion going for hours!

In The Press
Reviews of The Breaking of Eggs
Linda Ramsdell, The Galaxy Bookshop, Hardwick, Vermont, USA

“The Breaking of Eggs is a perfect novel. From the very first words, I loved the voice, the narrative, the whole entire story. Feliks Zhukovski is fascinating, and only becomes more so as the story twists and turns through landscapes of history and memory and place. The book is quietly profound and robustly witty. This is the bookseller's favorite kind of novel, a book to put in the hands of men and women of all ages, knowing that they will be back as soon as they have read it for copies to give to others who take great pleasure in reading.”


Thomas Gaughan, Booklist Magazine, USA

"Powell’s delightful debut novel is by turns winsome and moving. Feliks is an indelible character, and the people who enter his life tell remarkable stories of the suffering that fascism and communism visited on Europe. The Breaking of Eggs is a book that thoughtful readers won’t soon forget."


Nick Gormack, The Dominion Post Weekend, New Zealand

"The central theme of this absorbing debut novel is the human condition and how the macro events of history, with its politics and great events, randomly intersect with personal histories and the nitty-gritty of daily life. For many there is no connection at all; for others it can be life-changing. In the wry and likeable Feliks, Powell has created a fascinating character and one who is very believable. A great read."


Kerre Woodham, Paper Plus, New Zealand

"This is a lovely story of redemption and the underlying message that it’s never too late to find happiness. Feliks Zhukowski has lived in Paris for more than fifty years but he has never called it home. He has no family, no children and no lovers. Decades ago, he chose ideology over reality and politics over people and now that communism has collapsed, Feliks is left without purpose or faith. He publishes a small travel guide on countries of the Communist bloc which provides him with a modest income but at 61, he’s getting too old for living out of a suitcase. Besides, he doesn’t think much of the changes in the old Communist bloc since the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. An American firm offers to buy Feliks’s guide book and this sets in place a series of life changing events – he rediscovers his brother, learns the truth about the mother who abandoned him and reacquaints himself with an old flame. Endearing, quirky and a great read."


Peter Stothard, Times Online, 18 March 2010

""I've read your blog but what's the Breaking of Eggs book actually all about?" was the complaint at Daunt Books on the Marylebone High Street in London last night  ...
OK. Apologies for brevity and vagueness. I was just off the plane from the Berlin streets where some of the many fine parts of Jim Powell's novel are set ... Fortunately, I was able to say that this week's TLS gives a fuller version by Lesley Chamberlain of why Powell's book is worth the reading on any eastward plane journey - or any other journey."

Times Literary Supplement, 19 March 2010

"The Breaking of Eggs is a novel about middle age: not the strains on the body but on the inner life, the question of what it takes to survive. Feliks Zhukovski, who was born in Lódz, Poland, believes that his mother abandoned him when he was nine. He has made a competent life but never married; he lives for ideas and keeps people at arm’s length. The crisis begins when he realizes how lonely his days and nights are.

Feliks’s life changes dramatically during 1991, a year which opens with a newly reunited Germany and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Living in Paris, he has survived for the past decade on the proceeds of a guidebook to the Eastern Bloc. It has been a flourishing business but the old pro-Communist descriptions will no longer do, for Western visitors will now be able to see for themselves. He sells the business to a big American publisher, crossing the Atlantic to suit the whim of a curious CEO, and all the beliefs on which his life is based begin to unravel.

The sale brings people into an unpeopled life, potential friends and sources of information, who enable Feliks to question his assumptions. One meaningful encounter takes place in the American embassy in Paris when a mysterious French official sits in on a tense visa interview that could easily have ended badly for a man who was once a Communist agitator in a Peugeot factory and who worked on a magazine financed from the USSR. The French secret serviceman René is a collector and disseminator of secrets, both true and false.

Arriving in America, Feliks meets his brother Woodrow, lost to him for fifty years. Woodrow, now Woody, lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his bird-like wife, Wanda, grown-up children and grandchildren. There is a reunion outing to a theme park of American history for the children, and a lot of talking between the brothers, which is easier than Feliks feared. Comfort-loving middle America offends his idea of living in truth, but he has to ask himself, with all the revelations coming out of the fallen East, whether his own Communism had been truer.

There is an imperfect symmetry here: Wanda is an intellectual and moral blank; the house a Legoland neo-Georgian mansion; the history park tour a travesty of how things were. Feliks is not about to become an American like Woody; nor is he a Pole, nor a Frenchman. But Poland holds the clue to his past, because of what happened to his mother and why she had to send her sons away in 1939.

Two-thirds of the way through this fluent, unusual novel, the barriers that have been holding Feliks together emotionally collapse in a dramatic scene in a Warsaw hotel. It is memorable because it involves the unexpected kindness of a stranger and it shows him that truth is not holding a set of values, but experiencing things for oneself. Until the age of sixty, Feliks has been an emotionally deprived child, hence his adherence to the Party and his refusal to accept any criticism of Stalin. The end of a life led according to principle comes when he realizes that human actions are simply not controllable. Feliks is not a warm character, and he still has his qualms about the materialistic, dehistoricized life, but the warm-blooded people around him at Christmas 1991, all with their own hopes and needs, are the sign of hope for a long-delayed normal future."




Paul Torday, author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

"It is an intelligent novel, unafraid to tackle its subject matter of the alienation and suffering of those whose lives were disrupted by the Second World War, and down-to-earth, touching and funny."