MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)AD Miller covered the Orange Revolution for the Economist magazine but we should not infer anything from Independence Square, because he tells us not to. His author’s note goes beyond the standard proviso about any resemblance between fictional characters and real people being coincidental ... Isn’t it odd to set a book in a real time and place and say at the outset that nothing you are being told is trustworthy? Is it because Ukraine is of no importance except as an exotic locale? Or just because a British author requires a foreign setting, his own country being insufficiently corrupt and violent to provide narrative excitement? ... If plots are what you read novels for, Independence Square might grab you. But this one is about politics, which the author had already signalled he has no interest in except as fizz for his novel. So you may prefer to wait for Independence Square to reach Netflix and get it all over with in 90 minutes ... What novels can do is reveal character. If you cannot work up interest in the plot, Independence Square provides this real consolation and shows that the author has the power to be a real writer ... But the author’s ambition lay with the political-intrigue genre, and the really human things become secondary to the plot ... So instead we get a lot of damn foreigners! Who speak the simplified portentous English uttered by Tonto in The Lone Ranger, Oriental sages in kung-fu movies and Yoda ... It’s not Miller’s fault. He knows about Ukraine and knows about people and could tell us a lot about both. But the publishing industry wants novels and plots and movie deals and shortlistings for the Booker and, as with AD Miller’s last book, sales exceeding a quarter of a million copies – so this is what we get.
Rashid Khalidi
MixedThe Irish Times (IRE)Khalidi tells the story of the colonised well. Less complete is his depiction of the coloniser. He acknowledges that Israel differs from other colonial projects, but hesitates to explore the matter deeply ... There are those on the Israeli left who argue for a two-state solution and an end to the colonisation of the West Bank, and believe that security and compromise are compatible. But they lose elections. Perhaps it is outside the scope of Khalidi’s book to explore this dimension of the conflict, the basis of which is psychological as much as political, but it would have been a truly great book had he been able.
Varlam Shalamov, trans. by Donald Rayfield
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... revelatory ... Shalamov’s stories offer no hope. There are no heroes in a world where it was all you could do not to steal your starving fellow prisoner’s bread ration, or not denounce him in the hope of improving your own chances of survival. There is no glimmer of a redemptive moral message, such as we find in Solzhenitsyn. Shalamov describes a world of labour, frostbite, starvation and perpetual violence. But he does it from within a moral and literary tradition that precedes Stalinism and his hope was to connect, however precariously, with an earlier, more humane era ... Shalamov’s descriptions of Kolyma are superficially repetitive, but each tale manages to be unique and revelatory ... his accounts are never didactic. And, whatever the author’s protestations that he is not writing \'about\' the camps, the stories create a complete mosaic of the world of the condemned and beyond that of the society which enslaved them ... His stories can be so factual they read like essays and his essays sometimes evolve into stories ... Shalamov is such a powerful and consistent writer that you can approach his work at random, from any point. Each piece is a cold, glittering fragment of the mosaic.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
PositiveThe Irish Times (IRELAND)There are fine descriptions in Stalingrad ... The great writing alternates with passages of bombast and didacticism. Grossman does not capture the brutality inflicted on Soviet soldiers, or the brutality of which they were capable. His censors even struck references to petty thievery, swearing, rotten food, bedbugs – at one stage they removed mention of unwashed hands. Even moments of humour or farce were slashed for undermining the heroic tone. Yet Grossman struggled with ingenuity and tenacity for the partial truth Stalingrad contains. He pushed boundaries at great personal risk, and was sometimes successful. There is much in Stalingrad that is categorically not the official line. Stalingrad is a magnificent but mutilated achievement. Any simple response to it is bound to be wrong. Anything that can be asserted about it needs to be contradicted. As soon as it is examined as a narrative, we are forced to delve into the story of its tortured composition.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThere is an underlying struggle on every page ... a colossal work of research and is an attempt at de-censoring the author. Valuable notes are given to each chapter, indicating which versions were drawn upon ... The easiest way to read Stalingrad as a novel is to disregard these notes and to skip Robert Chandler’s fine introduction and afterword. But that would be to miss the true story and the reward of an intensive tutorial on the experience of writing under a dictatorship ... The present editors have been able to save much fine writing that Grossman was never permitted to publish in his lifetime ... a vast, ambitious book, in terms of characters and action and drama, and there is much fine writing in the descriptions of the city under aerial bombardment and during the fighting. Grossman had enough personal experience of the front to be able to create a gripping narrative. But if we have any interest at all in the novel’s relationship to historical truth, this is not enough; Boris Pasternak commented that only about 60 pages of the whole work struck him as genuine...is in fact two stories, and the more gripping story is that of Grossman’s struggle to tell the truth.
