All too slowly, this year, I have been making my way through alternating readings on the Irish, and the Russian, revolutions. Not all the material I have worked through has been 'radical' - no amount of huffing and puffing by Colm Toibin is going to convince me that Roy Foster's Vivid Faces is a text whose radicality matches that of some of its subjects. But Foster, though he often condescends to his 'revolutionary generation', is learned and brings together wonderful material from memoirs, diaries, letters, and other documents by participants in the turbulent events in Ireland in the 1912-1923 era. I have read Emmet O'Connor's short biography of Larkin, and Clair Wills's excellent account of the General Post Office both during the 1916 Rising and in its commemoration long afterwards. I am currently reading Charles Townsend's history of the Rising. And I have intermixed this Irish material with accounts of the events of 1917 in Russia - a short history of the Revolution by Trotskyist Neil Faulkner; John Reed's often electrifying, sometimes bewildering Ten Days That Shook The World, and Sheila Fitzpatrick's short but authoritative history. Tariq Ali's The Dilemmas of Lenin awaits my attention, and I've read back into the nineteenth century via Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers: hardly a radical account of Tsarist Russia, but a hint of intellectual background.
The book I anticipate most eagerly - friends will know that much of my life is lived within the imagined aura of books anticipated eagerly: alas, not always an indicator that said books will actually be read! - is China Mieville's October. I confess I had never heard of Mieville until his name appeared in the Verso catalogue I get a couple of times a year with my New Left Review. And so I have learned that he is a renowned science-fiction novelist, and a Marxist theorist of some capacity. A writer of many talents. Wonderful that he should turn those talents to give a fine narrative history of the Revolution. Here he is in discussion with Eric Blanc, no mean writer himself:
Conor
The book I anticipate most eagerly - friends will know that much of my life is lived within the imagined aura of books anticipated eagerly: alas, not always an indicator that said books will actually be read! - is China Mieville's October. I confess I had never heard of Mieville until his name appeared in the Verso catalogue I get a couple of times a year with my New Left Review. And so I have learned that he is a renowned science-fiction novelist, and a Marxist theorist of some capacity. A writer of many talents. Wonderful that he should turn those talents to give a fine narrative history of the Revolution. Here he is in discussion with Eric Blanc, no mean writer himself:
October and Its Relevance: A Discussion with China Miéville
Conor
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