Volume 9, Number 8 · November 9, 1967
Poisoned Cities
By Neal Ascherson
Birth of Our Power
by Victor Serge, translated by Richard Greeman
Doubleday, 264 pp., $5.95
The Third Book about Achim
by Uwe Johnson
Harcourt, Brace & World, 246 pp., $5.75
Night Falls on the City
by Sarah Gainham
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 572 pp., $6.95
All these books are love letters addressed to cities. For Victor Serge, the revolutionary, they are Barcelona, then Paris, then Petrograd, sprawling gardens of pleasure and gas-lit paradises to be 'taken' by the People as the Israelites came down and took Canaan. For Uwe Johnson, it is a weary, grimy city without a name, which is also Leipzig in the years of German Communism. For Sarah Gainham, it is Vienna, graceful and sick, the lamps of courage and reason dimming like theater lights as the Nazis arrive and deploy their power with a horror growing both more subtle and more blatant until the Red Army is at the gates.
Review, 2032 words
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