L'ultima favola russa

Red Plenty is probably one of the finest, and saddest, books I have ever read. It's hard to tell what it is. The best description I've heard is that it's science fiction-- only the science is economics, and the fiction is entirely based on real history. Red Plenty is about the rise and fall of the S Leggi tutto

A fascinating mix of history and fiction focusing on the Soviet Union from the late 1950s to 1970 and its attempt to engineer the economy into prosperity and to outpace the Capitalist economies of the West. It is the story of the collapse of the Soviet dream. A really interesting read, and one that

This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people i Leggi tutto

This is a story of how a dream is born and how it dies. The book is written as a novel, but it is definitely nonfiction, or maybe better, it is a dramatization. Yes, this is a dramatization of a usually dry and academic subject of planed economy and creating true Communism in the 50s and 60s. It star Leggi tutto

I loved Golden Hill , which is also by Francis Spufford , and so came to Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream with high expectations. It's set in Soviet Russia, during the Khrushchev era, primarily the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, and comprises a series of short stories which highligh Leggi tutto

Another novel, and one of the strangest I've read in a long, long time. It's a novel based on, of all things, the attempt to transform the Soviet economy using cybernetics and computers in the early 1960s, during Khruschev's cultural "thaw." The author describes the book as a fairy tale, albeit a he Leggi tutto