Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Best of 2019: Books
PIC CAP LEST WE FORGET: Stalingrad after the battle Pic: Sergey Strunnikov
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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.
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
GORDON PARSONS relishes a fast moving production of Sheridan’s comic masterpiece
GORDON PARSONS relishes a play that reveals how language carries much more than simple communication
