Tag: book-reviews

Podcast Episode: Cromwell Rehabilitated: John Morrill’s Oliver Cromwell: A Life in God’s Providen

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A biography that takes four decades to write and still, apparently, manages to avoid the most inconvenient parts of its subject's career — freerein61 has thoughts.

Mara: This episode covers one substantial piece: a critical review of John Morrill's forthcoming biography of Oliver Cromwell, which frames his entire career through the lens of religious sincerity. The review pushes back hard on what it calls revisionist historiography — the method, the Ireland chapters, the treatment of the Levellers, and a pointed polemic aimed at Tony Benn.

Pip: Let's start with the biography itself and what the review says Morrill is actually doing.

Cromwell Rehabilitated: Morrill's Biography and Its Ideological Stakes

Mara: The central question here is whether religious sincerity can serve as a genuine historical explanation — or whether foregrounding Cromwell's faith is itself an ideological move that displaces the class and colonial dynamics of the English Revolution.

Pip: The review names that move directly. Morrill's interpretive engine, as the piece describes it, is the claim that Cromwell "never doubted he was doing God's will," and that his political, military, and colonial decisions arose from "a profound sense of providential vocation."

Mara: And the review's response is that sincerity is not an explanatory category. Every seventeenth-century regicide, colonial adventurer, and religious persecutor believed he was doing God's will. That was a universal condition of the era, not a distinguishing feature of Cromwell's career.

Pip: So the argument is not that Cromwell was faking it — it's that his being genuine tells us almost nothing useful.

Mara: Exactly. The review frames it as mistaking ideological form for historical content. Cromwell's providential rhetoric was the language through which political and class forces expressed themselves, not the engine driving them. Morrill, the piece argues, treats that rhetoric as transparent — a direct window into motivation — when it was actually the discursive convention of the period.

Pip: Which is a generous way of saying the biography is empirically rich and historically evasive — the review's own phrase, more or less.

Mara: That tension runs through the whole piece. Morrill's archival command is acknowledged as formidable: letters, speeches, military dispatches, religious meditations, all reconstructed with precision. But the review argues that empirical richness is not the same as historical explanation. Moving from letter to sermon to meditation without situating those documents in structural context produces detail without analysis.

Pip: The Drogheda and Wexford sections make that tension sharpest. Morrill concedes the scale — the review notes he acknowledges that Cromwell's actions "verge on the genocidal" — and then asks how a sincere Christian could commit such acts.

Mara: The review calls that question misplaced. It reframes it: the real question is what class forces and colonial imperatives made such acts necessary to the English bourgeois revolution. The massacres were not aberrations — they were policy, part of the subjugation of Ireland required by English capital, aimed at breaking a rival social order, clearing land, and reorganising Irish society under English landlordism and mercantile control.

Pip: Turning a colonial strategy into a moral puzzle is, admittedly, quite a trick.

Mara: The review extends that critique to the Protectorate. Morrill presents it as a godly commonwealth, a culmination of Cromwell's spiritual journey. The piece reads it instead as a bourgeois dictatorship — one that consolidated property relations, suppressed radical movements, and expanded colonial power. The Major Generals become military instruments of class rule, not moral overseers; the dissolutions of Parliament become acts of authoritarian consolidation, not spiritual frustration.

Mara: The Levellers and Diggers get a dedicated section in the review, and it's pointed. The Putney Debates, often romanticised, are described as the prelude to repression. When Leveller agitation continued, Cromwell imprisoned leaders including Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, crushed mutinies in the New Model Army, and broke up Digger communities. The review argues Morrill acknowledges these events but presents them as expressions of Cromwell's "inflexible conscience" and "fear of disorder" — dissolving counterrevolution into moral struggle.

Pip: And the Tony Benn polemic is where the review says the biography's ideological hand shows most clearly. Morrill argues Benn misunderstood Cromwell by claiming him for a democratic tradition. The review's verdict is the reverse: Benn understood him too well.

Mara: The piece reads Benn's interpretation as insisting on the political nature of Cromwell's actions — placing the English Revolution within a broader tradition of struggles against autocracy and for popular sovereignty, while acknowledging Cromwell's contradictions. Morrill's anxiety, the review suggests, is that this reading threatens the revisionist project by refusing to depoliticise the revolution.

Mara: The review situates Morrill within a wider school — Conrad Russell, Mark Kishlansky, Blair Worden — whose consistent aim has been to dismantle Marxist and social-historical interpretations and replace them with a narrative in which the Civil War was not a revolution at all, but a tragic misunderstanding between constitutionalists. Cromwell is the central obstacle to that project because his career makes the revolution's class content impossible to deny.

Pip: The closing argument is that a genuine reckoning requires exactly what Morrill sets out to discredit: a materialist analysis that holds the contradictions together — the general who shattered the monarchy and suppressed the Levellers, the man who invoked divine providence while presiding over massacres that served English capital.

Mara: The review names Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, and Tony Benn as the tradition that has always insisted on that political reading — and ends by arguing that Morrill's biography is not a correction of past distortions but the most polished attempt yet to produce one.

Pip: Where the English Revolution goes in the historical imagination matters — and that's a fight that's clearly not over.

Mara: The stakes the review keeps returning to are real: how a society narrates its own revolutionary past shapes what counts as legitimate politics in the present.

Pip: Piety as a solvent for inconvenient history — it's a durable formula. Next time, more from A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mieko Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich: Childhood Tenderness and Late Capitalist Atomization and the Misrecognition of a “Minor” Work

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Mieko Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich (2013; translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai, Pushkin Press, 2017) has been widely praised as a charming, light novella, a quirky story of childhood crushes and a whimsical introduction to her more expansive works like Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. This praise isn’t superficial; it reflects a broader trend. Modern literary criticism, driven by market demands for longer, topical, and relevant works, often dismisses short, precise pieces as minor. As a result, the novella as a literary form is often seen as inherently modest and unworthy of serious social commentary.

Louise Heal Kawai’s translation of Ms Ice Sandwich is vital in conveying the novella’s quiet emotional power into English. Her translation exemplifies restraint, tonal fidelity, and an intuitive understanding of Kawakami’s focus on childhood. Kawai maintains the narrator’s voice, capturing its awkwardness and innocence without smoothing it out. The boy’s clipped observations, quirky phrases, and natural repetitions are conveyed in English with a subtlety that feels genuine. This authenticity is essential, as the story’s structure relies heavily on a child’s realistic inner monologue.

Kawai’s English translation preserves Kawakami’s straightforward and rhythmic style, which is deceptively simple. She intentionally avoids embellishing the prose for an English-speaking audience, keeping it sparse so that emotional depth arises from detailed moments rather than explicit commentary. This restraint reflects Kawakami’s own choice to avoid editorialising. The translation strikes a delicate balance between tenderness and fragmentation, avoiding over-explanation of cultural details or making them feel flat. Elements like the supermarket, convenience-store meals, and grandmother’s care are rendered subtly, allowing readers to sense the social pressures without explicit explanation.

Kawai’s extensive work translating contemporary Japanese women writers demonstrates her dedication to capturing voices that speak in everyday language. Ms Ice Sandwich benefits from this background, as she recognises that Kawakami’s strength lies in emotional accuracy rather than stylistic flair. Far from a detour in Kawakami’s development, Ms Ice Sandwich exemplifies her artistic approach: honest portrayals of consciousness free from sentimentality, social agendas, or distortions of the world she depicts. The novel investigates childhood innocence against the backdrop of late capitalism, a society where care is privatised, attention is commodified, and cruelty subtly permeates daily life.

The novella’s strength is not in its narrative breadth but in its honesty. It captures how a child understands neglect, difference, and disappearance in a society that lacks stable social structures to keep people visible. In this way, Ms Ice Sandwich is far from a minor work. It is a clear, concise miniature, and its modesty reflects true artistic integrity.

The novella is narrated by an unnamed fourth-grade narrator who secretly fixates on a young woman at a supermarket sandwich counter. Her electric-blue eyeshadow, bold, unrepentant, and intentionally unfashionable, captures his complete attention. He calls her “Ms Ice Sandwich,” visits daily to see her make sandwiches, and builds a delicate emotional connection around her.

This fixation is not precocious romance. Kawakami is careful to avoid sentimentality. The boy’s attachment is a child’s attempt to find stability and recognition in a world where both are scarce. Around this fragile point of attention, Kawakami arranges the real substance of his life: a mother physically present but emotionally absent, absorbed in her phone and a new relationship, stretched thin by work and domestic responsibilities; a grandmother in a near-vegetative state, tended at home because no adequately funded public institution exists to provide care; a classmate, Tutti, herself isolated and motherless, who becomes the boy’s only confidant; a household running on convenience-store sandwiches, thin margins, and thinner emotional reserves.

None of this is presented as social critique. Kawakami does not editorialise. She does not explain the mother’s exhaustion, the grandmother’s illness, or the economic pressures shaping the household. She renders them as the unremarked texture of daily life, the background conditions against which the boy’s consciousness takes shape.

This restraint is not a limitation. It is the mark of a writer committed to truth. As Aleksandr Voronsky argued, art’s social function is “the cognition of life,” not instruction. Kawakami’s fidelity to the child’s perspective allows the reader to perceive the social world precisely because the narrator cannot.

The boy’s world is one in which neglect is not dramatic but ambient. It is not an event; it is an atmosphere. The mother’s remoteness is not cruelty but exhaustion. The grandmother’s decline is not tragedy but routine. The boy’s loneliness is not exceptional but structural. The novella’s abiding anxiety is the disappearance of people, of attention, of care. As the narrator puts it, “The worst thing is, you never know when somebody’s going just to disappear.” The line is characteristic: disappearance is the emotional grammar of atomised life.

The novella depicts small yet impactful moments of cruelty. Adults gossip that Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyeshadow conceals unsuccessful cosmetic surgery, while children tease Tutti’s physical difference. The boy gradually and painfully realises that those who differ from societal beauty standards are easily marginalised. These scenes are not meant as moral lessons but offer initial insights into a society structured around appearance and consumption, which categorises people into visible and invisible groups. Kawakami’s skill lies in showing the child’s experience of this sorting process without explicitly explaining it. She portrays cruelty as the child perceives it: sudden, confusing, and unanswerable.

Rosa Luxemburg emphasised that, for true artists, the social principles they promote are secondary; what truly matters is the inspiration behind their art. In Kawakami’s work, this inspiration is a commitment to fidelity and a refusal to distort the consciousness her world fosters. She refrains from attributing insights to children that they cannot have and avoids imposing top-down social explanations. Instead, she depicts cruelty as it manifests in real life: not as an ideology, but as everyday humiliations and small humiliations.

In this sense, Ms Ice Sandwich illustrates how cruelty is acquired rather than taught. It is absorbed through social interactions such as gossip, mockery, and casual judgments made by both adults and children. The novella primarily focuses on the boy’s awakening to this cruelty.

The novella depicts a highly fragmented social world. The family unit has broken down into separate individuals. Care responsibilities are privatised, and attention becomes a commodity. The grandmother’s illness remains managed at home due to the inadequacy of public institutions; economic strain and precarious work conditions influence the mother’s emotional withdrawal. The household’s dependence on convenience-store food is not a mere detail but a sign of deeper issues.

Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan accurately characterises a society where economic insecurity, demographic decline, and weakening social ties create widespread loneliness. Kawakami’s novella isn’t a sociological analysis, but it depicts this situation vividly. The boy’s loneliness isn’t accidental; it results from a society where social structures have been stripped down and weakened.

The grandmother’s silent, immobile presence is symbolic. She holds the boy’s confidences, being the only adult he speaks to freely, yet she cannot respond. Her care is unpaid, unseen, and draining. Her illness isn’t a dramatic plot device but a structural element of the story. Similarly, the mother’s exhaustion is a structural reality, not due to neglect but to being overwhelmed by a society that privatises care and commodifies attention. Kawakami doesn’t explain this directly, and she doesn’t need to. The truth lies in the details of the boy’s life. This exemplifies Voronsky’s “cognition of life”: art that reveals social realities not through analysis but through honest depiction.

Many critics view the novella’s lack of depiction of social change as a weakness. The boy’s development occurs through personal growth rather than a change in the social circumstances causing neglect. The grandmother stays ill, the mother remains burdened, and economic pressures are unchanged. However, from a Marxist perspective, this is not a flaw but the book’s truthful representation.

Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, argued that revolutionary art cannot be created by simply giving the artist a specific program. Art that tries to “solve” social issues directly risks becoming propaganda. Artistic success is measured not by whether a work advocates social change but by whether it truthfully depicts life.

Ms Ice Sandwich succeeds exactly because it stays true to its world, not trying to go beyond it. The boy’s personal resolve isn’t an escape from social reality but its true form within individual isolation. In a society where people deal with socially caused suffering as private issues, the child can’t envision changing the situation because no individual alone can. It would be false to expect him to understand his mother’s overwork or his grandmother’s illness as social issues. This would be an unrealistic projection of awareness that the depicted world can’t produce. Kawakami declines this falsehood, marking her as a truthful writer. The novella does not “stop short” of imagining change. It depicts a world in which such imagination is structurally impossible. This is not a limitation; it is the book’s fidelity to reality.

Some might see Ms Ice Sandwich as a precursor to Breasts and Eggs, which explores themes like reproductive labour, bodily autonomy, and class more directly. However, being direct doesn’t necessarily equate to artistic greatness. A modest piece that honestly depicts its subject can sometimes be more valuable than a grander work that tries to explain what it can’t fully explain. The common thread in Kawakami’s work isn’t size but sensitivity: her keen awareness of the gritty details of women’s and children’s daily struggles, loneliness, and resilience. Ms Ice Sandwich isn’t a minor piece; it’s a focused one. Its small scope is a strength, supporting the work rather than restricting it. The novella’s strict adherence to the child’s perspective, avoiding sentimentality, editorialising, or falsification, is what makes it an artistic success. It functions as a work of understanding, not didacticism. By showing the social world through the eyes of a child who cannot grasp it, it enables the reader to see what the child cannot.

A Novella of Tenderness, Cruelty, and Truth

Ms Ice Sandwich is a genuinely modest book. Its compassion lies with the overlooked: the elderly, the sick, the underpaid, and those who are visibly different. It portrays childhood awareness without sentimentality, false comfort, or an imported political agenda. The book doesn’t attempt to resolve the social issues it depicts, nor does it envision a world beyond fragmentation. It doesn’t give children insights they couldn’t naturally have. Instead, it presents an honest view of a world where care is privatised, attention is treated as a commodity, and cruelty flows casually through everyday life. That is its achievement, and it is enough.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Texts

  • Kawakami, Mieko. Ms Ice Sandwich. Translated by Louise Heal Kawai. Pushkin Press, 2017.
  • Kawakami, Mieko. Breasts and Eggs. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Picador, 2020.
  • Kawakami, Mieko. Heaven. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Europa Editions, 2021.

Marxist Aesthetics

  • Luxemburg, Rosa. “The Russian Revolution.” In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. Monthly Review Press, 2004.
  • Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. Pathfinder Press, 1991.
  • Voronsky, Aleksandr. Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings. Edited by Frederick Choate. Mehring Books, 1998.

Secondary Criticism and Context

  • Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke University Press, 2013.
  • Uno, Kathleen. “Care Work and the Japanese Family.” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 3 (2003): 695–718.
  • Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
  • Napier, Susan. The Anime Aesthetic and Japanese Modernity. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Podcast Episode: What the “Transition” Left Behind: On Joanna Elmy’s Born of Guilt

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A novel about three generations of Bulgarian women, a debut that's been making waves since 2022, and a literary critic who apparently missed the entire point — freerein61 brings all of it to A Trumpet of Sedition, and somehow the most contested thing is what we call the 1990s.

Mara: That's the territory we're in today — a debut novel, the historical rupture it maps, and the critical framework that struggles to see what the novel is actually doing. Let's start with the novel itself and what the so-called transition left behind.

What the "Transition" Left Behind: On Joanna Elmy's Born of Guilt

Pip: The central question here is what it means to inherit guilt from a history you didn't make. Joanna Elmy's Born of Guilt follows three Bulgarian women across three eras — communist repression, the catastrophic 1990s, and labour migration to the United States — and the post asks whether the novel's fragmented structure is equal to the weight of that history.

Mara: The post frames the novel's formal ambition clearly. Elmy uses a multi-voiced, non-linear structure, and the review describes it as "thematic accumulation, revisiting wounds from different perspectives and times." That's not decorative — it's the argument: no single timeline can hold what these women experienced.

Pip: And the upshot is that the guilt of the title isn't personal pathology. It's a relay baton passed between women who each believed the catastrophe around them was somehow their own fault, when the actual causes were institutional and external.

Mara: The post is precise about what those causes were. Bulgaria's 1990s — what Western coverage called democratic transition — meant, in practice, austerity, mass unemployment, crime, and the collapse of collective infrastructure. Yana, the youngest of the three, is described as born "shortly after what the novel repeatedly refers to as the end of history," and she doesn't inherit freedom. She inherits her mother's and grandmother's accumulated social crisis.

Pip: Which is where the post's second target comes in — Mia Levitin's review of the novel, which the post treats as a case study in what liberal literary criticism does when it encounters politically specific suffering.

Mara: The post's argument is that Levitin's review is "polished, craft-focused, and largely silent on the novel's historical and social context." Domestic violence and addiction become universal dark themes; migration becomes a personal journey of self-discovery. The structural forces — IMF-directed privatisation, shock therapy, the labour-export economy that made an entire generation leave Bulgaria to survive — go unnamed.

Pip: Calling that a neutral omission is itself the ideological move, which is precisely the post's point. Silence on cause isn't apolitical; it's a position.

Mara: The post also engages seriously with the novel's own limits. Elmy renders the atmosphere of collapse — queues, austerity, structures failing — but the post notes that the economic devastation is "less frequently examined as a historical process with clear causes and beneficiaries." The novel stays close to inner life, which is a real artistic strength and also a real constraint for a reader wanting to understand the why.

Pip: So the novel is a beautifully observed record of symptoms. The post credits Elmy — the comparison to Gospodinov and Tokarczuk is earned — while holding open the question of what politically engaged fiction owes its historical material.

Mara: The closing point lands hard: Eva, Lily, and Yana did not create the circumstances that shaped their lives. The guilt the title names was manufactured elsewhere, by institutions and decisions that neither Levitin's review nor, quite, the novel itself names directly.

Pip: Which leaves the reader holding the question the novel raises but doesn't fully answer — and maybe that's exactly where criticism should begin.

Mara: What stays with me is the relay structure — each woman believing the damage was hers alone, when the source was always outside the family.

Pip: That's the work criticism is supposed to do: trace it back. Next time, more of that tracing.

Review: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 2022. 560 pages.

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147) 

“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”

R F Kuang’s-Babel

“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”

Leon Trotsky

‘What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.’

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,

R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens

It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master’s and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.

R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.

Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.

Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.

Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]

Poppy Trilogy

Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.

In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.

To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.

Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book’s accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.

At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.

As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.

As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.

No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient’s past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings’ contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]

Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence

Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]

Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]

Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party’s sentiment that Kuang’s book is a “goldmine of revolutionary politics.” While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.

However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.

Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.

The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.

Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.

[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html

[2] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm

[3] www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang

[4] Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/

Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund, Verso £10.99, 144 pages

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Once a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czeslaw Milosz

“The relationship between mother and son and mother and daughter is different, because the mother is a mirror in which the daughter sees her future self and the daughter is a mirror in which the mother sees her lost self.”

Is Mother Dead

“What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”

 Long Live the Post Horn!

“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting; the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”

― Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead

Vigdis Hjorth occupies a prominent place among contemporary Scandinavian writers. Her novels examine family conflict, memory, gender and legal institutions through psychologically acute, often fractured stories. Hjorth is extremely well known in her native Norway and throughout Scandinavia. She began writing in the early 1980s. She started writing children’s books and moved on to fiction for adults. She is a prodigious writer with some forty books under her belt. It is a safe bet that if more of her books were translated into English, she would be a far bigger writer. All her English books have been translated by the excellent Charlotte Barslund. Four of her books in English are variations on a story of family rupture and estrangement, with more or less the same cast of characters.

To understand Hjorth and the broader landscape of Scandinavian fiction, the reader must study the political-historical context of Hjorth’s work and examine the social functions performed by literature in a petty‑bourgeois milieu. Hjorth’s fiction often explores the fractures of bourgeois family life, individual trauma and the legal and cultural institutions that sustain property and social standing. On a deeper level, her work shows how “personal” suffering is shaped by class relations—inheritance disputes, cultural capital, gendered social labour, and the moral vocabulary that deflects systemic critique into private pathology.

While you would be hard pushed to describe Hjorth as a left-wing writer, her novels do make an ideal entry point for politicising cultural debate. Her focus on family law, inheritance, trauma and testimony intersects with current social conflicts over housing, social care, gender violence, and access to justice. She reveals how “private” disputes often reproduce material inequalities and legitimise social hierarchies.

Hjorth’s fiction is heavily influenced by other Scandinavian fiction, which also often depicts welfare infrastructures, gender norms and small‑property relations that appear “progressive” yet conceal new forms of commodification, household debt and petty‑bourgeois aspirations. Hjorth, like other Scandinavian writers, both male and female, frequently recycles sets of ideological strategies that hide class antagonisms while channelling popular grievances into non‑class answers.

Perhaps the master of this genre is Soren Kierkegaard, whom Hjorth greatly admires. Kierkegaard is a crucial figure in the genealogy of modern bourgeois ideology: his subjectivism and rejection of reason helped lay philosophical groundwork for existentialism, postmodernism and the anti-scientific tendencies of contemporary ideology. Kierkegaard’s turning away from reason anticipated the modern cult of subjectivity, the delegitimisation of science, and the promotion of personal mysticism as an alternative to collective political solutions. Hjorth has to be very careful not to get too close to him; her writing will take on a very reactionary turn.

In her latest book, Repetition Hjorth goes over familiar ground. As Elaine Blair points out in her critical review, “Hjorth has been returning to this material for more than two decades, offering different perspectives on the constellation of prodigal daughter, ambivalent siblings, convention-bound mother, and tyrannical father. Her novels have spanned different periods of time, some focusing on a limited period of months or years, others pulling back to tell the whole story. It’s as if she’s asking: Where is the story? What is the best way to tell it? In a sense, Hjorth’s narrators did not experience the crucial events of their lives in chronological order. An ordered timeline is true to the abusive father’s perspective (he alone knew what happened and when) but not to that of the daughter, whose experience of abuse, with its repressed and resurfaced memories, defies the schema of linear time. The abuse was happening to her, then it hadn’t happened to her, then it had happened to her, a long time ago.”[1]

Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, although only 144 pages, is a psychologically acute, formally inventive exploration of memory, trauma and personal alienation. The reader needs to understand it as part of the broader social and historical fabric, and not to study it not only as individual psychology but as a social product whose form and themes are shaped by class relations and institutions.

Hjorth’s Repetition locates trauma and interpersonal breakdown inside the family, legal procedures and therapeutic institutions. Far from being purely personal failures, these institutions appear in the novel as mediators that translate social distress into individual pathology. This depiction is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal transformation of social life in Norway and globally. Under neoliberalism, governments and employers have shifted costs and responsibilities onto households and individuals. In Norway, this has taken the form of tightened welfare provision, market pressures on municipal services and an expansion of private providers alongside public services. Internationally, the same logic prevails: health, social and legal services are re‑organised to be “efficient” for budgets and profitable for providers. At the same time, the working class and small proprietors pick up the bill.

Hjorth’s portrayal of family collapse, court proceedings, and therapy mirrors these transformations: families are expected to absorb economic and emotional strains; the law is increasingly an instrument for adjudicating private disputes in ways that reproduce social inequality; therapy becomes a form of individualised management that treats symptoms rather than social causes.

Why do Hjorth’s novels matter, and what can we learn from them? They are important now because they dramatise the individual consequences of social atomization under neoliberalism: privatised suffering, judicial and therapeutic institutions that individualise social injury, and cultural narratives that valorise personal authenticity over collective remedy.

 Notes

 A closer look at Kierkegaard-Tom Carter-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.html

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, by Joachim Garff, translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. 867 pages, Princeton University Press, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.ht

[1] Where Is the Story? Vigdis Hjorth repeats herself-harpers.org 

On Gerry Healy’s Books

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

On 16/03/26, I visited the Socialist Workers Party bookshop, Bookmarks. While looking at the second-hand bookshelves, I noticed a lot of old Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) books, like 10 copies of the Trotskyism Versus Revisionism series 1-6. The bookshop has three large bookshelves of second-hand books. I noticed more books, like Marx’s collected works, Lenin’s collected works and more books by Leon Trotsky.

I felt something was wrong here, so I went to the reception desk and asked if they knew anything about it. I was told that a representative from Vanessa Redgrave had initially offered two storage lockers full of books in early 2025. The SWP told Redgrave that they don’t buy. Redgrave donated the books to the SWP. The books were loaded into a medium-sized van in June or July of 2025. The books were advertised for sale through the SWP’s social media sites.

Given that Healy had a library that spanned over fifty years, one can only imagine how many were donated and what exactly Redgrave kept back. It is not well known that Healy’s secretaries kept a political diary. Excepts can be seen in Corrin Lotz’s somewhat sycophantic biography of Gerry Healy. What documents does Redgrave still hold on to?

Having a further look at the books on the Bookmarks shelves, I notice a significant number with G Healy written inside. Healy spent an inordinate amount of time writing in the books.

Healy clearly annotated his books to engage more deeply with the text, enhance comprehension, and retain information, essentially turning his reading into an active conversation with the author. It serves as a personal record of his thoughts, feelings, and insights, facilitating easier reference later and adding a deeper layer of enjoyment to the reading experience. It means that future historians will not have access to this precious archive.

It is clear that the books donated are not from Redgrave’s library but are, in fact, Healy’s personal library. I know this because six months before the split in the WRP in 1984, Redgrave sold off an enormous amount of her books. I purchased two suitcases full of her books, including the proof copy of One Long Night, with her name inside.Also, there appear to be several books from the WRP library, which I assume were at Clapham. It appears Redgrave must have looted that library. This needs further investigation, but I am pretty sure it is part of, or the whole of, G Healy’s library.

It is clear that Redgrave has no interest in revolutionary politics and by carrying out this act of political and historical vandalism spits on the history of the movement. The books should have been donated to a library or an academic institution such as Warrick University.

Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias-, Gerald Martin (Translator), April 2025 Penguin Classics

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

 “Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.

Miguel Ángel Asturias.

“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …

Men of Maize

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”

Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.

Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.

One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.

There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.

While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer’s work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]

On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of “Weekend in Guatemala” by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.

Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”

Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]

Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism

Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]

Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.

Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.

It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote

“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class’s position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]

Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.

Notes

Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott

Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365

Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman


Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal


A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao

[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html

[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/

[3] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/marq-m14.html

[4] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm

Making Space (The Time Traveler’s Passport) by R. F. Kuang, Amazon Kindle Edition 2025

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]

R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]

Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.

I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.

As the great  G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”

And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today’s world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]

While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is ‘too articulate’ a critique only reserved for female authors?”.

In defence of Kuang Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the ‘realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, and she deploys this (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that “allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.” However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit”[4]

Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray

[2] https://www.netgalley.com/

[3] Art and Social Life by G. V. Plekhanov 1912-https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1912/art/ch03.htm

[4] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/rebecca-f-kuang.html

Who Is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell Hardcover – March 26, 2024, by D. J. Taylor

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

George Orwell 1984

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”― George Orwell, Animal Farm.

The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of freedom. But for that same reason, epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.

Leon Trotsky Revolution Betrayed (1936)

The essence of Marxism consists in that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Leon Trotsky’s Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

D J Taylor’s new book is an extremely good introduction to the work of George Orwell. However, it joins an already overcrowded market, so much so Taylor was encouraged to justify his new book. It must said Taylor’s book is one of the better book releases. It is a well-researched perceptive analysis of the work of Orwell. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of many new releases and articles attempting the “uncover the real Orwell”. Some of these books and articles have been nothing more than hack work aimed at character assignation and burying Orwell ‘s reputation under a large pile of dead dogs.

Before I review Taylor’s book, I would like to say something about a recent article from the Orwell’s Society’s website[1]. The article in question was by Patrick Homes called Can We Truly Rebel? Fisher and Orwell[2]. Homes begin by mislabeling Fisher as a Marxist. Fischer was nothing of the sort. He was a pseudo-left masquerading as a Marxist and a very pessimistic one at that.

Fisher’s 2008 book Capitalist Realism offers no real alternative to Capitalism. It was easier for him to “imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”. Fisher cannot imagine a modern world without Capitalism. Not a very classical Marxist position I might add. While offering mild criticism of Capitalism, Fisher accepts that Capitalism “entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment.”[3] It would appear that Fisher has accepted Francis Fukuyama’s Mantra that we have reached the “End of History” and that Liberal Capitalism is now the only game in town.[4]

Fisher writes, “The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, and gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”[5]

Unfortunately there are no surprises in Fisher’s book. He is both hostile and disdains  orthodox Marxism and its history in equal measure, writing, “One of the left’s vices is its endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going over Kronstadt or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organising for a future that it believes in.”

Unlike Homes, I do not believe Fisher’s intellectual framework offers an insightful understanding of George Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four. Regardless of his faults, and there were many, Orwell did not share Fisher’s total pessimism or despair. His “Hope Lies in the Proles “ from 1984 is a clear indication that Orwell saw the working class as a revolutionary class and was the only force that could overthrow Capitalism. Orwell was not a Marxist, but throughout his life, he sought to understand and live by Marx’s theory that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”[6] I am pretty sure that Orwell would have concurred with Marx’s understanding of the role of the individual in history. Marx wrote, “Men make their history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[7]

As was said earlier Taylor’s book is a fine introduction to the literature of Orwell. D. J. Taylor is a leading scholar on Orwell, and this book is the product of decades of work on Orwell. Taylor concentrates mostly on Orwell’s literary output and focuses less on his political involvement. Orwell’s trip to Spain had an enormous impact on him, and if you want to understand the real Orwell, you have to study Orwell’s experience in Spain and his book Homage To Catalonia. This book is far more important than Animal Farm or 1984. As Taylor writes, “Spain, it is safe to say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown Socialism in the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might work.”[8] Taylor is not a Marxist and can only offer a perfunctory analysis of Orwell’s experiences in Spain.

A closer approximation of Orwell’s time in Spain can be found in the analysis of the Marxist writer Vicky Shaw, who wrote, “Orwell’s experience was different from most other artists and intellectuals, who went to Spain as supporters of the Stalinist Communist Parties, which many still associated with Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the revolutionary traditions of October 1917 and which possessed a massive apparatus for both propaganda and direct repression of dissent. For George Orwell to produce and publish such material then was, therefore, no small task. The Kremlin bureaucracy was actively seeking the physical annihilation of the entire generation of Marxist workers and intellectuals who had made the Russian Revolution in 1917 possible, while internationally, the Communist Parties were acting as the agents of Stalin in suppressing any opposition to the bureaucracy’s interests wherever such opposition appeared. Orwell’s honest account of the Spanish events also conflicted with the reigning perceptions amongst large layers of revolutionary-minded working people.

Homage to Catalonia is, therefore, a seminal text and remains an excellent introduction to the Spanish events and the strangling of the revolution by Stalinism. However, Orwell could not elaborate on a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. Eventually, the domination of the workers’ movement by the bureaucracy, combined with the victories this gave Fascism, led him to extreme forms of political demoralisation, as is seen in his book 1984. He supported the democratic imperialist powers in the Second World War”.[9]

Taylor does not make much of Orwell’s faith in the working class. In 1984, he believed the “proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a “vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles”.

That said, Orwell never clarified his position towards the 1917 October Revolution. As Fred Mazellis correctly states, “Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for “left unity,” adapting to the Stalinists and criticising Trotsky’s merciless critique of Stalinism as “sectarian.” In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, supporting the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement.”[10]

To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As John Newsinger correctly points out, “Taylor’s achievement is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school, St Cyprian’s!”.

[1] https://orwellsociety.com/

[2] https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/

[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?2008

[4] The world economic crisis and the return of history-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/meet-f02.html 

[5] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[6] The Communist Manifesto

[7]  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[8] Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell

[9] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html

[10] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/george-orwell/

Diary of a Nobody

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Current Work

I am working on a review of George Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp. There are several new books on Orwell out now, so I will be kept busy doing reviews. I have paid primary visits to the archives of George Orwell held at UCL, and Bernard Crick’s archive is at Birkbeck.

Three long-term projects are the books. I will update the collection of the Why I Write series that is already in eBook form on Amazon. I want to add some more writers to a new version. The second will be a collection of essays on the historian Raphael Samuel. The third will be a short book or long essay on Oliver Cromwell and the Putney Debates. Cromwell was the subject of my car crash 2003 dissertation for my BA History at Birkbeck.

I will write a short letter to the London Review of Books. It published a terrible letter from B. Letzler called The Shoah after Gaza. He managed to call Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side  “Dud”

Recent Book Purchases

  1. The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes. I have written previously on this subject.
  2. Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan. An extraordinary book well researched on the disappeared children and coercive adoptions in Guatemala.
  3. Cancion by Eduardo Halfon
  4. The Great Revolutions by Duncan Hallas. I fine SWP tradition seems to concentrate on What happened rather than why.
  5. The Blazing World by J Healey. This is the paperback version. I have been meaning to get around to reviewing this for ages.
  6. Travellers of the World Revolution by B Studer, Verso
  7. Marxism and the English Revolution by John Rees. This has not been released yet. I will get a review copy, hopefully.

Recent Events

I regularly attend the online SEP Postal Workers Committee. I follow their work closely and their stuff on the Post is way better than I can write. They write about it. I work it. A good combination.

I have started to watch a few episodes of Sky’s Royal Kill List. What a terrible piece of television. If there was a historian consulted on this programme, he should share the same fate as Charles 1st. When a series has so much swearing, it has very little to say and even less history.