Unforgiving Years
Victor Serge
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 1590172477
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
indifferent to the colicky burpings of the cannon. They don’t bother me either, my plucky little robot, so tell me, what do you have to say about the flow of time? Imbecile, you count the minutes without knowing what they are, the miser counts his pennies, the general counts his bombs, the refugee counts his fleas, the executioner counts his victims, no one knows what it is … One more little glass of wine A glass to get us feeling fine … Good song, that! Alain smashed the neck of another
Noémi? A primitive woman’s name. I can see you bathing, as in Sorrento … It will happen.” (At least admit the possibility. All that remains is to make it happen.) That they would never again lay eyes on other, more humble places, clothed by winter snows more stirring than the gilded blues of Sorrento. Separately and together they both had this thought — and pushed it away. “You have a lot of strength left, Sacha …” Nadine said sadly. (Too much to no longer be of any use …) “I’ve always
“experience.” And didn’t I once read a novel deserving of the title The Spoiled Children? Our managed literature is superior to the other, its children are more wholesome … The play was well written, full of poetic verve. One child, twelve-year-old Zina, has chestnut pigtails and toils away at her homework in a bombed-out house. Zina is passionately keen to become class leader, “because my big brother’s fighting the invaders, and this, Mother, is my way of fighting!” The siren wails, Zina shuts
detailed to sift through the ground, pounded into chalky dust … Death disappeared: no more danse macabre! The crater was a great oval wound gouged into the field, and no living thing subsisted in this earth cleansed by fire; not a worm, not a root, not a blade of grass … Günther tried to remember the general’s face: a tight-ass engineer in a high collar, insignia, splendid kepi … The troops feared him, for he was a stickler in hopeless situations. His gloveless hand was like a hook: the
soldiers know it. Slacking off or overworked, their sole virtues are those of beasts. Where was it? A shapely pair of female legs, frozen in an upside-down dance step, tipped with high-heeled patent pumps, poking out from beneath a fall of rocks; they were only just beginning to turn blue. The gang made dirty jokes. It occurred to me that this would make a good photograph to hang beside the one of the carbonized head, still imperiously erect, that I saw on a burned-out turret. The diptych could