What book are you reading?

catefrances wrote:

arthur rimbaud - enid starkie

You'll need to understand French to get on with that one.

I recommend the Steinmetz book instead.

Vassily Grossman - Everything Flows



Ukrainian war reporter Vasily Grossman was one of the first to describe a Nazi death camp in print, and his 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” was used at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal as evidence of the Holocaust. His postwar career in Soviet Russia was marked by persecution: He was censored by Joseph Stalin’s antisemitic regime, and after he submitted his masterful World War II novel Life and Fate to a publisher in 1960, the KGB confiscated the manuscript, his notes and even his typewriter (the book was later smuggled out of the country and printed in 1974). But this didn’t quiet Grossman, whose indictments of Stalinist Russia were at least as damning as those of George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Understandably bitter over the suppression of his work, the author worked on Everything Flows—a shorter, but even more eviscerating, meditation on the monstrous results of the Soviet experiment—until his death from cancer in 1964. This new translation brings his searing vision to light.

The novel opens as Ivan Grigoryevich, a once-promising intellectual long ago banished to the hell of the Gulag for some long-forgotten transgression, is released following the death of Stalin. As he revisits figures from his past, many of whom lied or ratted out dissidents in order to stay free, Grigoryevich sadly shakes his head at the moral cowardice in the face of the state’s supreme wielding of violence.

Everything Flows is not a subtle work, but these were unsubtle times. Grossman uses only the surface trappings of a novel in his stark ruminations on 20th-century Russia, particularly Stalin’s systematic destruction of his enemies. His descriptions are intense; at one point, he effectively puts the reader right in the middle of a dying Ukrainian village during the Great Famine in the early 1930s. Fortunately, the KGB couldn’t keep Grossman’s books under wraps forever. His testament stands as a fitting tribute to the millions of voices that were prematurely silenced

Read more: Everything Flows - Books - Time Out New York http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture ... z1Dq2JA7G2