The NY Times was not content to give Francis Spufford’s mixture of fact
and fiction about the USSR (faction—really) “Red Plenty” one rave
review. At least two were necessary. On February 14th this year, Dwight
Garner wrote this valentine:
Any reader with a pencil has a dozen ways to express negative sentiment
in the margins of a book — I am partial to ick, ack, awk, ugh and the
occasional wha? — but a writer’s great sentences, in their bid for
posterity, mostly just get underlined. At the end of the first chapter
of Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” however, I printed a nerdy but
heartfelt word: “Bravo.” I felt like giving the author a little bow, or
maybe a one-man standing O.
For what it is worth, Garner also went head over heels for Saïd
Sayrafiezadeh’s “When Skateboards Will Be Free”, a callow memoir about
growing up an SWP red diaper baby. I guess that even when there if there
was no longer a single Marxist alive anywhere in the world, reviewers
will still be singing the praises of such books. That is to be expected
when the contradictions of capitalism create the objective conditions
for a renewed interest in Marxism, as is the case today.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/red-plenty/
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