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| Unforgiving Years | 
| Author: Victor Serge
Creator: Richard Greeman
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 193825
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1590172477
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9781590172476
ASIN: 1590172477
Publication Date: February 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new, never read, perfect; immediate same day shipping
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Product Description
A New York Review Books Original
Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge’s final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.
The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.
A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev
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| Customer Reviews:
The Real Thing April 28, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I can't say enough about this novel. Along with Victor Serge's "The Case of Comrade Tulayev," also re-issued by New York Review Books, it represents the highest level of political fiction; that is to say, both novels are also important literature. If "Tulayev" reads like Dostoevsky on "speed," "Unforgiving Years" also has a hallucinatory quality. With mesmeric power Serge dramatizes the sense of living on the edge in a world of exile, deracination, emigration and loss. And the amazing thing is that Serge not only wrote brilliantly about the Great Terror and the subsequent "purges" under Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and uprooted lives as a result of the ensuing world conflict, he lived everything he wrote. The result is an authenticity of person, place and event that are seldom experienced except in the finest novels of the period, among which Serge's finally take their place.
"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us March 13, 2008
22 out of 26 found this review helpful
and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison." Heinrich Heine
Victor Serge did not have to invent entirely new beasts to pen his vision of the Second World War in the "Unforgiving Years". The beasts that were unleashed by the 20th century's apocalypse were not Serge's creation. However, what Serge has done so masterfully here is to craft a story that looks at this world through the eyes of a few of its participants. The result is a horrific, almost hallucinatory look, at a world gone mad.
Serge was born in Brussels in 1890 to Russian emigre parents. He returned to Russia early in 1919 in order to support the newly created Soviet Union. He served as both a writer and journalist. However, Serge was one of the first of the old-line revolutionaries to oppose Stalin's concentration of power. He was arrested, expelled from the party, released, and arrested again. Finally, in 1936 after a public campaign by leading European political and literary figures (Andre Gide was one); Serge was released and deported to France. He eventually found his way to Mexico where he died, penniless, in 1947.
"Unforgiving Years" is set in four sections and in four locations. In the first section, set in Paris in the days just before the start of WWII, "Secret Agent", we are introduced to Agent D. D is a Soviet agent who has finally had enough of the purges, paranoia, and betrayal that marked Soviet life (both at home and abroad) during the height of Stalin's purges. He has no plans to defect; he simply wants to escape to some place off the grid. He talks to Daria (the one character to appear in all four sections of the book), another agent and former lover to join him. His preparations and their discussions about his departure form the heart of "Secret Agent". This section is filled with the sort of beautifully realized self-critical examination that marked Koestler's dialogues in "Darkness at Noon". It is a remarkable piece of writing.
The second section, "The Flame Beneath the Snow", is set in Leningrad during the worst days of the 900-day siege. Daria has returned from internal exile in Kazakhstan to assist the Red Army's (via the security forces) defense of Leningrad. This is a street-level look at a Soviet city under siege. This is not a look at the battle as much as it is an examination of the life of Daria and her conflicting feelings as she goes about her job amidst death, destruction, and slow-starvation. All feelings are cast aside, or seemingly cast aside. What is left is not love but random acts of gratification.
The third section, "Brigitte, Lighting, Lilacs", takes us two a German city in the final days of the war. Daria is operating behind the lines as an agent, doing what she can to obtain information while protecting partisans and foreign (Eastern European) refugees. What is remarkable here is Serge's treatment of the German civilian population caught in the constant bombardment and devastation of their city. Writing in 1946, when the full scope of the horror of the camps and the devastation of the war generally was still fresh in everyone's mind, Serge's considered treatment of the people of this city presaged W.G. Sebald's Natural History of Destruction by fifty years or so.
Last, Daria and Agent D are reunited at the end of the war in a remote village in Mexico. The conclusion to"Unforgiving Years"is very powerful and,in its own way, entirely fitting.
"Unforgiving Years" paints a picture of a world gone mad as seen through the eyes of Daria and the circle of people she meets along the way. Serge is brutally honest in his view of man in what has to be considered a brutish state of nature. Life is nasty, brutish, and short and people react accordingly. Serge's writing matches this mood and that is what I meant when I said his writing was almost hallucinatory. It jumps in mood and pace seemingly at whim. A character goes from thinking `big thoughts' to focusing on the minutest aspect of a random daily act. But I was engaged from the first page and had trouble putting the book down.
As noted so aptly in the introduction by translator Richard Greeman, Serge asks "how to live if history no longer has a meaning? What remains of human consciousness if society has indeed entered a regressive era of ideological repression and technological pan-destruction?" These are questions that, sad to say, seem as timely now as they were in 1946. "Unforgiving Years" was finished just before Serge's death. It is, undeniably, his masterpiece. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig
P.S. Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics) (fiction) and Year One of the Russian Revolution
(non-fiction) are also well worth reading.
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