{"product_id":"unforgiving-years-isbn-9781590172476","title":"Unforgiving Years","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA New York Review Books Original\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eUnforgiving Years\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe  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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion,  and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, \u003ci\u003eUnforgiving Years\u003c\/i\u003e is a rediscovered  masterpiece by the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Case of Comrade Tulayev.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eUnforgiving Years\u003c\/i\u003e, published in France in 1971 and translated into English this  year, is a visionary literary work rooted in the political tragedy of a Soviet secret  agent who tries to take back his existence from the Party. The settings are prewar  Paris, the siege of Leningrad, the fall of Berlin, and a postwar refuge in Mexico.  This is the ultimate farewell to Communism.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Unforgiving  Years\u003c\/i\u003e...has now at last been translated into electric English by the indefatigable  Richard Greeman...It's a seething, hallucinatory novel...\" --\u003ci\u003eHarper's \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Born in  Brussels of Russian revolutionary exiles, Serge (1890-1947) has long had a reputation  as polemicist and journalist, but this powerful novel of the descent into WWII makes  a strong case for his political fiction...Serge remains sophisticated even during  the book's more noirish moments, and action sequences form an inseparable part of  his hypnotic, prophetic vision.\" --\u003ci\u003ePublisher's Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (Starred Reveiw)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The work  of the writer Victor Serge faultlessly captures the labyrinth of bureaucratic incrimination  into which the Soviet Union descended.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A witness to revolution  and reaction in Europe between the wars, Serge searingly evoked the epochal hopes  and shattering setbacks of a generation of leftists…Yet under the bleakest of conditions,  Serge’s optimism, his humane sympathies and generous spirit, never waned. A radical  misfit, no faction, no sect could contain him; he inhabited a lonely no-man’s-land  all his own. These qualities are precisely what make him such an inspiring, even  moving figure.” –\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Both \u003ci\u003eUnforgiving Years\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Case of Comrade Tulayev\u003c\/i\u003e in 2003 have been wonderfully translated by Richard Greeman, who has spent his academic  and post-academic life bringing to prominence Serge’s writings as literature in the  first ranks of modernism and in the mainstream of Russian and French literature.  His foreword to \u003ci\u003eUnforgiving Years\u003c\/i\u003e is worth the price of the book, which deserves  attention as well for reminding us that the political novel was once a prominent  genre and fulfilled a need hard to meet in this self-absorbed literary period. It  also gives us a clear-eyed picture of Serge’s sad last years when hope, if it existed  at all, was mostly the frail hope of inmates in prisons and concentration camps.\"  -World Socialist Web Site\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A worker, a militant, an intellectual, an internationalist  by experience and conviction, an inveterate optimist, and always poor…He took part  in three revolutions, spent a decade in captivity, published more than thirty books  and left behind thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, correspondence and  articles. He was born into one political exile, died in another, and was politically  active in seven countries. His life was spent in permanent political opposition…His  refusal to surrender to either the Soviet state or the capitalist West assured his  marginality and consigned him to a life of persecution and poverty. Despite living  in the shadows, Serge’s work and his life amount to a corrective to Stalinism, and  an alternative to the market.” –Susan Weissman, \u003ci\u003eVictor Serge\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I know of no other  writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and  his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been  many scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth extended far  beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it.” –John Berger\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Serge, who has been  championed by Susan Sontag and many others, was born in Brussels in 1899 to emigre  Russians who'd fled the Czar. He became a political activist, was jailed and arrived  in Russia in 1919 to support the Bolshevik Revolution. He rose high in the Comintern  before falling foul of Stalin and finding himself in jail and then exile. He was  steamrolled by history, and out of this experience he crafted a series of extraordinary  memoirs and novels. \"Unforgiving Years,\" here translated into English for the first  time by Richard Greeman, tells the story of two revolutionaries, D and his friend  Daria, as they approach, endure and survive World War II. This is downbeat and dangerous  mise-en-scene...written for real by a man who was there.\" —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Serge can recognize the range of experience and responses that make up the texture of life in even the most nightmarishly repressive system.\" --Scott McLemee\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eVictor Serge\u003c\/b\u003e (1890—1947) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian political exiles. Enduring five years of prison in Paris for his anarchist beliefs, in 1919 he went to Russia to support the Bolshevik Revolution. Serge served as the editor of the journal \u003ci\u003eCommunist International\u003c\/i\u003e, but was expelled from the Communist Party and imprisoned for his condemnation of Stalin's growing power. Released but arrested again, his deportation to Central Asia spurred international protests from eminent figures such as Andre Gide, who succeeded in securing Serge's freedom and exile in France. He wrote fiction and aided Trotsky until the German occupation of France, after which he fled to Mexico.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRichard Greeman\u003c\/b\u003e is based in Montpellier, France, where he is Secretary of the International Victor Serge Foundation. He is a member of Praxis Center (Moscow). He has been a professor at Columbia, Wesleyan and the University of Hartford, and an activist since the 1950s.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302714986725,"sku":"NP9781590172476","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590172476.jpg?v=1767743245","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/unforgiving-years-isbn-9781590172476","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}