Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...very well known in the U.S.). When Hitler came to power, Wiechert backed one of the dictator's most detested internal enemies, Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, and paid for it with five months in Buchenwald concentration camp followed by years of enforced silence. Tidings, Wiechert's posthumous novel (first published in Germany in 1953) is the fruit of his musings during those brutal years. It is, in the publisher's words, "a Christian message for an age that is un-Christian and totalitarian...
...unmistakably: "What am I doing here?" At that moment, the bright, articulate men sound empty and the chic, smiling women appear sad. This detached mood of mild horror is usually gone with the next drink, but Novelist McLaughlin has made it last the length of a very good short novel...
...life and death of Leon Trotsky, a kind of Marxist Macbeth, have been made into a novel by U.S. Author Bernard (The Late Risers, In Deep) Wolfe, who was one of Trotsky's aides in the years before the inevitable assassin caught up with him in his Mexico hideaway...
...some principle by which the names have been changed to protect the guilty, Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in this novel is called Victor Rostov. But there is no doubt that the book is about the chess-playing, intellectual Commissar of War (1918-25) who lost his long struggle for power with Stalin. Trotsky became the grand heretic of a religion whose god is the state; it was his peculiar hell that he never ceased to believe in the religion that had made him its principal devil...
Sentimental Legend. Some of this involves the novel in dense thickets of Marxist homiletics. But two things in Wolfe's fictional chronicle are intriguing in human terms. One is the sense of Trotsky-Rostov's real devotion to his wife. The other is his personal gentleness and charm. He kept pet rabbits (one was called George Sand), which had been bought to give the household its own supply of meat, but which, when it came to the point, the author of The Defense of Terrorism could not bear to have killed...