ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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Best of 2019: Books
LEST WE FORGET: Stalingrad after the battle
[Sergey Strunnikov]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
WHAT must be one of the outstanding events in the book publishing year was the first English edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Victor Grossman’s Stalingrad, a kind of prequel to his magnificent Life and Fate.
Grossman was throughout the second world war a special correspondent for Red Army newspaper The Red Star and was posted in 1942 to the armageddon of Stalingrad, the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war.
More than simply a novel or history, this symphonic work captures the day-to-day desperate struggle for survival by soldiers and civilians alike.
There is no glamorisation in Grossman’s merging of cinematographic detail with a poetic prose that captures the pain, hope, love and seemingly impossible resilience of humanity at the extreme.
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