A swirling fascinating chaotic story.

It has a basic "Further Reading" appendix and a useful but frustratingly incomplete "Glossary of Personal Names" to help readers with the Russian names.

This damned book needs an editor's touch. At first I thought it was just suffering from peculiar British stylisms, but now I think they simply published the rough draft their famous author submitted. ( )

Закончил чтение «Октября» Чайна Мьевиля (Miéville, China. “October.” Verso Books), который эксмовский импринт FanZon обещает выпустить в ноябре. Писателя такого я ранее не знал, т.к. художку современную не читаю. Однако, как я понял, круг его фанатов широк. «Октябрь» - нонфикшн, но было обещано, что это будет нонфикшн с сюрпризом. И что же в итоге? Рецензии тут не будет, так, пара наблюдений и викторина.

Во-первых, ничего сверхординарного в повествовании я не обнаружил. Это документалистика, хроника. За что, кстати, спасибо – радзинсковщины не хотелось. Во-вторых, автор не удержался, и ушки писателя художки-таки показываются. Торчат они в форме некоторых вычурных словечек, в том числе местами избыточными синонимами, как здесь: “two conflictual, overlapping, imbricated politics”. Imbricated слово не знает даже словарь моего Mac’a, а вот Чайна Мьевилю оно известно, и вам теперь тоже станет известно, что он его знает. После поста я приведу несколько таких словечек, которыми он выпендривается. Если вы большинство из них знали, то ваш словарный запас больше моего, - респект! Однако и мой значителен, но в сотнях нонфикшн книг (в т.ч. жёстко наукообразных) я их не встречал.

«Сюрприз» же видимо подразумевал художественные обороты и попытки навести драматизма и саспенса, которые в основном выглядели нелепо, из-за их явной переигранности (радзинсковщина):

“Kerensky began to fear that he had created a monster. He had.” Это про Л. Корнилова.

placid tsarry eyes. О царе.

ersatz starets (старец) О Распутине

“the epochal tetchiness of Russian liberals”

Ну и словарь:

ca’canny

groupuscules

“a kind of glazed satori of his own limits”

integument

“The testeria of the reception was genuine,”

“pitiful mix of longueurs and schmaltz”

“near-glossolalic sermon of despair”

chivvied

ayes

rah-rah

qua figurehead

bruited

autotelic

etiolated Provisional Government

dudgeon

spiv

stentorian

telos

The author certainly likes to use a lot of million dollar words, and as a lover of language that's fine with me. The fact that reading this on a Kindle allowed me to instantly look up those million dollar words made me even more fine with it.

Language oddities aside, this book is a very good read. ( )

Pretty good. It was hard to follow some of the names and groups after awhile. All the committees started to sound alike. Still a good listen. ( )

I'd give this something like 1.666 stars. I didn't dislike it. I admire China Mieville a good deal. I am socialistic in my political leanings and have been fascinated by the Russian Revolution since high school. So I was eager to plunge into Mieville's trawl through that frantic, thrilling, scary year of 1917. The Prologue, "The Pre-History of 1917," encapsulates preceding decades, introducing a typically Russian enormous cast of characters (there IS a Glossary of Personal Names in the back, which helps... a little). Lenin, for example, is introduced thus: "He is a man easily mythologized, idolised, demonised. To his enemies, he is a cold, mass-murdering monster; to his worshippers, a godlike genius; to his comrades and friends, a shy, quick-laughing lover of children and cats." Mieville is good at this: swift, sharp little portraits. And he needs to be: this episode in history is so stuffed with noblemen, soldiers, students, intellectuals, politicans, generals, workers, leaders and followers and disrupters in a kaleidoscope of tumbling factions, parties, dumas, soviets, zemstvos, councils, splits and schisms, coalitions and fractures that there is precious little time to spend on any one of them. It all moves along at a breakneck pace, a whirlwind of victories (Pyrrhic and otherwise) and reversals, progress and loss. This certainly reflects the stunning course of events over days (even hours) and weeks, but... this reader kept gulping for air, coming up after pages with little understanding of what had just happened. I started, stopped, took a break, tried again, but on page 122 read this sentence: "...immediately after the April Days, the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party...took place. There, Lenin added his new 'right' critique of the left to his left critique of the Bolshevik right." Understanding, naturally, that the Bolsheviks were the extreme left... I just couldn't do it any more. When Mieville takes a moment to slow down, as he does when Alexander's generals intercept him on his royal train to plead with him to abdicate, it is dramatic, tense, and even poignant, as the tsar agrees to abdicate in favor of his young son, only to be informed by the boy's physician that the boy is unlikely to live long enough to serve. This is why I don't want to say I "didn't like it." Perhaps it's my own impatience or lack of attention, but I simply got lost in the hubbub, and even Mieville's crisp, vivid, adjective-smart writing was not enough to hold me fast. Your mileage may vary.

juliestielstra.com ( )