The little white attic

There is often something violent in the works of Flannery O’Connor. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories , the weakest stories ar...

How do you write about a book such as Everything Flows ?  It is about a man named Ivan Grigoryevich, who after Stalin’s death is released af...

1/ Viktor, who isn’t prominent in Part 1, becomes the main character in Parts 2 and 3. In some ways he’s a type, so that we know what it fee...

1/ Krymov, Yevgenia’s former husband, the fanatical communist who has no sympathy for “enemies of the people”, is now arrested and put in th...

1/ In the previous blog post, I had some complaint about Vasily Grossman’s depiction of German/ Nazi characters. As anyone who reads this bl...

1/ There’s been something before, but in this part, Vasily Grossman writes more about the environment of deep distrust and paranoia (is this...

 1/ Life and Fate is even more closely modelled on War and Peace than I thought.  Like Tolstoy’s book, Vasily Grossman’s book has a large ...

1/ Each language—or your experience of each language—has its own associations. Two words that mean the same thing in different languages can...

1/ For years I have wanted to read Life and Fate , the Soviet War and Peace , but often hesitated, partly because I felt unready to immerse ...