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i_need_organization_skills's review
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
on_doveswings's review
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
mavyblue's review
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
dallaseckman's review
challenging
dark
funny
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
“Do you understand, Boris, what it means to mold clay with your own two hands, to fire bricks for your own house…..to feel you’re the core of a marvelous human avalanche that has torn free and is flying into the future.”
Riveting - a bold, captivating love-letter to the proletarian masses and the Soviet Union.
Jasieński folds together captivating, dangerously intelligent prose and poetic, enticing language for a literary tour de force both in praise and defense of the wretched of the earth under the yoke of capitalism.
Riveting - a bold, captivating love-letter to the proletarian masses and the Soviet Union.
Jasieński folds together captivating, dangerously intelligent prose and poetic, enticing language for a literary tour de force both in praise and defense of the wretched of the earth under the yoke of capitalism.
onerodeahorse's review
3.0
Pierre is having a run of terrrible luck. Fired from his job in a factory, duly evicted from his small Paris apartment, and to make matters worse, his girlfriend Jeanette is rapidly losing interest in him. Worse still, Paris is controlled by bourgeois interests, grinding the working classes into homelessness and deprivation. There are no opportunities, there is no work, there is no hope. Pierre becomes bitter, angry, full of recrimination. When a friend who works in a scientific laboratory shows him the vials and test tubes full of concentrated diseases that are kept there for research, Pierre hits upon a nasty little idea. He steals a vial and releases it into the Parisian water supply - and a plague comes to the French capital.
This is the premise of Polish writer and Futurist Bruno Jasineski's 1929 novel I Burn Paris, a work whose reception in France saw him expelled from the country (only a decade or so later he was to be executed at the hands of the Stalinist purges) and which since has achieved a kind of cult status, neglected as it is. The book itself displays its communist sympathies proudly, as Paris descends into ethnic or social enclaves in the aftermath of the plague outbreak. The communist Chinese faction cordons itself off, as does the Jewish community, the Parisian proletarian community, the wealthy Anglo-American community, and more besides. Various intrigues and double-crossings then emerge from this voluntary ghettoization, which forms the bulk of the novel's plot.
What's clear about the book is that it is a novel of ideas, and that those ideas are political first and foremost: the characterization of its protagonists is thin, and there is little of the exploration of interior lives that you might expect. None of the characters (with the possible exception of Pierre) feels like real people, but are best thought of as ciphers for various cultural or political forces that Jasienski wants to personify. As the translator notes in the afterword, the book feels like it is delivered from a podium, Paris as seen from above. The effect of this is two-fold: at times it makes the book feel urgent and necessary, a call-to-arms for the dispossessed; at other times it makes the reading experience feel flat and rather lifeless, as though you are reading a broad overview of historical events on an unusually detailed Wikipedia article. An unkind judgement would be to say that Jasienski is not an artist, he's an ideologue, but this would be to sell him short somewhat: there are compelling and exciting passages in I Burn Paris to accompany its pretty transparent grandstanding.
This is the premise of Polish writer and Futurist Bruno Jasineski's 1929 novel I Burn Paris, a work whose reception in France saw him expelled from the country (only a decade or so later he was to be executed at the hands of the Stalinist purges) and which since has achieved a kind of cult status, neglected as it is. The book itself displays its communist sympathies proudly, as Paris descends into ethnic or social enclaves in the aftermath of the plague outbreak. The communist Chinese faction cordons itself off, as does the Jewish community, the Parisian proletarian community, the wealthy Anglo-American community, and more besides. Various intrigues and double-crossings then emerge from this voluntary ghettoization, which forms the bulk of the novel's plot.
What's clear about the book is that it is a novel of ideas, and that those ideas are political first and foremost: the characterization of its protagonists is thin, and there is little of the exploration of interior lives that you might expect. None of the characters (with the possible exception of Pierre) feels like real people, but are best thought of as ciphers for various cultural or political forces that Jasienski wants to personify. As the translator notes in the afterword, the book feels like it is delivered from a podium, Paris as seen from above. The effect of this is two-fold: at times it makes the book feel urgent and necessary, a call-to-arms for the dispossessed; at other times it makes the reading experience feel flat and rather lifeless, as though you are reading a broad overview of historical events on an unusually detailed Wikipedia article. An unkind judgement would be to say that Jasienski is not an artist, he's an ideologue, but this would be to sell him short somewhat: there are compelling and exciting passages in I Burn Paris to accompany its pretty transparent grandstanding.
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