Tristan’s Reviews > Life and Fate > Status Update

in this section Grossman feels at once heavy handed and somewhat directionless and it is hard to discern if this is subtlety of skill or not. again the external narrative of the dissident writer overtakes the actual text in places - how to read an SS officer's "we're not so different" speech to an old and still committed bolshevik if not as some small indictment of the very idea?

grossman is of course a believer in 'totalitarianism' as an framework for understanding both nazism & stalinism but it's hard for me to read his descriptions of the holocaust and also properly stomach chandler's introductory assertion that the work "establishes the identity of nazism and soviet communism." but i guess we will see what grossman thinks as we go on.

"In the end he talked and argued himself into another journey at government expense to Tashkent. There he stayed, marvelling at the power of geographical arguments in a theoretical discussion [...]"