Darkness at Noon
Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he...
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Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, Darkness At Noon asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It is—as the Times Literary Supplement has declared—"A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama..."
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Format: mass market paperback
ISBN:
9780553265958 (0553265954)
Publish date: March 1st 1984
Publisher: Bantam Books (NY)
Pages no: 224
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Novels,
Science Fiction,
Academic,
School,
Literature,
Cultural,
Historical Fiction,
20th Century,
Politics,
Philosophy,
Russia,
Dystopia
Series:
Nice book about the madness of the purges and the radical logic of the revolutionaries.
A fiercely intelligent examination of the thought behind ruthless totalitarian communism through the account of a former Party Commissioner who is arrested and interrogated by a member of the younger generation, a native of the revolution.It seems to me that Koestler has set out to render a great se...
bookshelves: published-1940, slavic, classic, fraudio, holocaust-genocide, lifestyles-deathstyles, philosophy, psychology, recreational-homicide, teh-brillianz, translation Read in November, 2009 Unabridged and read by Frank Muller. Highly Kafkaesque in tone insomuch as it's bleak, dark humoure...
A recent re-reading of Darkness At Noon didn't live up to my memory of it from many years ago. The prison descriptions were excellent, in a claustrophobic way, and the inner workings of Rubashov's mind in an effort to keep his sanity were riveting indeed. But the long political discourses about "t...
Darkness at Noon is one of a class of novels, mostly prison and interrogation things, in which all is just so hopelessly restrictive and cramped - so lacking in even the smallest victories.So, it's not fun. And it's not particularly new.Koestler, though, was an early-adopter communist who had suffer...