Grossman’s epic masterpiece ‘Life and Fate’ is one of my favourite novels of all time (easily top 5, if not top 2) so I was looking forward to this. Lovely hardback cover as well. It is a collection of various Grossman essays/short stories over the course of his literary career, from his early days in popularity, then the terror of Stalin’s purges, the time spent as a war correspondent, his essays on Treblinka and the Shoah, then post war articles as a writer who had been fallen foul of Stalin.
Highlights include:
‘In the Town of Berdichev’ is a short story of a woman who abandons her family to be a good Bolshevik to go into battle. The Shoah era stories show the terrifying ordeal of Jewish civilians living under the Nazi ordeal and this includes the masterful report, and one of the first, on a Nazi death camp - ‘The Hell of Treblinka’. Despite the odd factual inaccuracy its immensely powerful and very descriptive of a truly hellish place.
The Elk is pretty short but Grossman manages to succinctly attack both man’s attitude to animals and those who betrayed their friends etc in naming and denunicating them during the great purges of the 30′s. ‘Mama’ is a very clever approach to writing a story about the fevered and deadly atmosphere of the purges. By looking at the events through the eyes of an adopted baby by the Head of the NKVD Grossman is able to portray the rise and fall of Yezhov – the ‘dwarf’ who is helped Stalin purge hundreds of thousands in a brief period of time.
To summarise: buy this book immediately. Ok, I know I am quite evangelical about Grossman but he really is one of the best, bravest and honest Russian writers of the 20th century.
No comments:
Post a Comment