The Dwarfs

A well-established member of the Absurdist Theatre tradition, Pinter pulls no literary punches in this, his only novel. For those who know of his plays' stark ambiguity and pointed pointlessness, this novel will be nothing too new. Pinter is a man of thematic contradictions, someone who elucidates the morals and meanings of senseless with the tools of obsfucation and slyly crafted symbolism. He has a point -- he always does -- but those points are always disguised, usually as themselves, and so his work is never what it seems to be. You either have patience for Pinter, or you don't, and part of what most lovers of Pinter go for is the translation of his work onto the stage by living actors with some measure of skill. Pinter's work is of life, despite how surreal it always may seem, and it finds its greatest expression in the medium of flesh and blood. Therefore, this novel falls short in some ways, most notably in that it is only alive as much as the reader's own imagination is, and given the smoke screens and philosophical fogginess that permeates the text, it is likely that readers will run high on impatience before they do on understanding. However, for those careful and delicate literature lovers with the time and focus necessary for the task, Dwarfs is a densely layered and methodically crafted tale of common lust and betrayal mixed with some rather heavy-handed but finely wielded philosophy. Sometimes the writing delves into repetitious, monochromatic, self-aggrandizement, but this is usually just the knee-jerk aspect of Pinter's play-work marring the novelistic medium. In general though, he gains a lot of ground with this book, even if, by the time you're done reading, you're not sure where you've ended up.