I like it better now, but having finished it, I will not keep it. I won't read it again. It is the memoir of a grumpy 80 year old. Worse, it is a grumpy 80 year old who loathes coffee. He attacks espresso machines on occasion and has ended friendships and marriages because of his anti-coffee obsession.
For a coffee lover like me, his rants are painful. Worse I am in the midst of reading the 15th book in the Master and Commander series in which the central characters are two great friends who share a love of music and coffee. And I just spent a week with a good friend from the Army in the 1970s who has been a Franciscan monk in Germany since shortly after leaving the military during the Cold War. Bruder Timotheus and I have very different lives, but we share a love of good coffee.
I realized as I read the book, it is also something of a blueprint for my favorite novel by Helprin: Paris in the Present Tense. In both novels the central character is at the end of his life telling a story that begins with losing both of his parents in a brutal, senseless murder. Both lead lives of love, loss, promise, courage and failed expectations.
But Paris left me wanting to re-read the book and mark passages, which I did. Antproof left me smiling thinking that this was the trial run before the book I love most.
Since it is Helprin, there are brilliant passages:
The human soul is ordinary, existing by the billion, and on a crowded street you pass souls a thousand times a minute. And yet within the soul is a graceful, shining song more wonderful than the stunning cathedrals that stand over the countryside unique and alone. The simple songs are best. They last into time as inviolably as light.
And Helprin's books always have humor. This book begins: Call me Oscar Progresso, or for that matter call me anything you want.... following that first line I was ready for a grumpy old narrator.
And the book is dedicated--To Juan Valdez.
