Grossman's deliberately plain prose has an extraordinary imaginative power. With any luck, a public much larger than the one that encountered the novel in Robert Chandler's excellent English translation will soon recognise Life and Fate as all the things critics say it is: one of the great narratives of battle, a moral monument, a witness-report in fiction from the heart of 20th-century darkness, an astonishing act of truth-telling.Īnd it truly is these things. It will have a starry cast, including Kenneth Branagh as the nuclear physicist Viktor Shtrum – the nearest thing in the vast human ensemble of the book to an alter ego for Grossman himself. T his autumn, the BBC's drama serial based on Vasily Grossman's epic novel of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (1959), comes to Radio 4.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |