Hardcore for Nerds

Eurocrisis? What Eurocrisis? Or rather, an excuse to reread some dark literature of Europe’s political past:

“The Abyss, the sequel to The Burned Bramble in Manès Sperber’s great trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean, continues the story of the communist experience and depicts the difficultsies encountered by the men and women caught in the crossfire between fascism and Stalinism. This novel focuses on the personal despair of Doino Faber, the young revolutionary, and on the stunning events that shook the world between 1937 and 1939.

The characters in this book are confronted with the Munich Pact, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the annexation of Austria, and the Hitler/Stalin Pact in dizzying succession. Shortly after they become immersed in the effects of the invasion of Poland by the Germans and the Russians and of the outbreak of World War II. The men and women living through these upheavals are engaged in a constant struggle, continually grappling with the question of how to be politically effective …”

When I read this while studying Koestler’s novels, I remember this book being very short on action and long on lengthy conversations - which also seems appropriate to the current climate.

velveteenrabbit:

onestonedcrow:

Koson Ohara

Via real-funny-lady

for HC4N.

I just finished reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet today, set in Japan at the beginning of the 19th century. 

I really like David Mitchell’s historical fiction (well, this and Cloud Atlas) but it’s written with such obvious, and plain, flair that I yearn for some stodgier literary fiction. There are too many cliff-hangers and the humour is rather broad (he has accurate research and characterisation, but does the Irish character really need to say ‘God, Mary and Oliver feckin’ Cromwell’?) so that it’s like watching an AMC show that should have been made by HBO, or whichever way it goes now. Of course it would be worse to plod through something written by, say, (the later) John Banville, but there was one whole page of stylistically attractive but plot-irrelevant prose I had to skip over because I wanted to know what happened next; somehow, ‘literature’ has ruined my patience for ‘thrillers’, although truthfully I never had much in the first place and was always something of a skim-reader.

Currently reading, and likely to feature it in multiple future posts. Anyone who follows my postings on history and politics can probably guess he is (was, sadly) very much up my street. I came to him only fairly lately, though, and I think I’ve only read every second one of his books: starting with his study of French intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, Past Imperfect, which I read for my MA dissertation, which was on another figure to crop up frequently in Judt’s writing, Arthur Koestler.

To my shame, I haven’t gotten around to reading (at least more than in part) what’s generally considered Judt’s most important work, Postwar - but since I was introduced to it in my last year of undergraduate history, inter-war Europe has been my main interest, and as the introduction to the above notes, Judt’s Postwar obviously only tells half the story of the history of the 20th century in Europe, which is best covered in the book I was first introduced to then, Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent. I have read his collection of essays, mostly from the New York Review of Books, in Reappraisals, but what I liked best of all was the extended essay, in book form, of his defence of social democracy in Ill Fares the Land (here is my still-accurate but depressingly pre-bailout commentary on the passing mention of Ireland in the book).

Given the closeness in time between the two books (I haven’t read the more personal Memory Chalet published shortly after his death), it’s understandable that many of the same points come up here in the musings between Judt and his interlocutor/interviewer Snyder. But as well as the politics of socialism and liberalism, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here about religion and the progress of thought from the beginning of the century. I can’t help but keep making large-scale historical comparisons between the observations he makes about the modern era then and the (post-, although he’s distrustful of that and ‘cultural studies’ in general) modern era now; is today’s rootless neoliberalism the globalised capitalism of the pre-First World War world? Obviously history doesn’t come in such neatly identifiable cycles, if it comes in cycles at all, but exploring the present through the lens of the past is one of the more practical results of the discipline. More anon…

currently reading (or was I?)

betterbooktitles:

George Orwell: 1984

This is a rather ungood title - it’s the ending, for chrissakes! It took me a moment to work that out though, so kudos I suppose. But since it’s all most people reference from the book anyway, I’d go with ‘Big Brother’s Little Brother (The Novel)’.

(Or, more mischievously, how about ‘Big Government is Bad’?)

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favourite book (cover)

(detail from Francis Bacon, Man in Blue V 1954)

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slaughterhouse90210:

“…She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

BUT THEY ARE AT WORK! WHY DO WOMEN MAKE EVERYTHING SO DIFFICULT?

(reblogging mainly because this is the first time I think I have read/watched, and enjoyed, both parts of a Slaughterhouse 90210 post)

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