The Invisible Writing (Vintage Classics)
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Book Description
'Perhaps the most remarkable autobiography since the confessions of Rousseau' V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman
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Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of twentieth-century man and his dilemma. Arrow in the Blue ended with his joining the Communist Party and The Invisible Writing covers some of the most important experiences in his life. We see him in Germany, Russia, England, France and Spain, working sometimes openly and sometimes underground for the cause in which he believed. This was the time of the 'seven years' night' over Europe - of Hitler's spectacular successes against the Western Democracies. They were also the years of the great Russian purges, which led to Koestler#s eventual break with Communism in 1938, after Hitler and Stalin between them had claimed the lives of most of his friends and relatives. This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It puts in perspective his experiences in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France (told at greater length in Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth), and ends with his escape from Occupied France in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home. An epilogue brings the story up to 1953, when it was written. Koestler calls the book 'a typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in our time'. It has two main themes: the historical background against which the author developed, and an unsparing analysis of his intellectual and spiritual development. (20050324)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
First of all, it's only worth reading this book if you've read Part 1, Arrow in the Blue. If you've already done that, you're probably thirsting for Part 2, but I must frankly admit that you may find Arrow in the Blue runs at a deeper level than The Invisible Writing, which is the account of his life from 1932-40 (giving just a short outline of the experiences already covered in greater detail in Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth), without as much philosophical commentary. I've seldom read two parts of a book which were so different in style, but they're equally enjoyable.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Part 2 of Koestler's autobiography
6 July 2007
Format:Paperback
First of all, it's only worth reading this book if you've read Part 1, Arrow in the Blue. If you've already done that, you're probably thirsting for Part 2, but I must frankly admit that you may find Arrow in the Blue runs at a deeper level than The Invisible Writing, which is the account of his life from 1932-40 (giving just a short outline of the experiences already covered in greater detail in Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth), without as much philosophical commentary. I've seldom read two parts of a book which were so different in style, but they're equally enjoyable.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
What a pity so few read Koestler today
6 Jan 2012
Format:Paperback
I cannot remember any other book I have recently read which so deeply touched me than this one. Perhaps Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It could be so because I myself went trough similar experiences in the USSR in the nineteen seventies Koestler went through in the nineteen thirties. He was there during the peak of the Ukrainian famine 1932-1933 which claimed several million victims, one of the most horrific periods in Soviet history ( brilliantly demonstrated in Grossman's Everything Flows ), so my comparison may seem inappropriate, yet it is his reaction to the reality of everyday Soviet life which reminded me of my own.
The crux of the whole book is Koestler's disappointment with Communism and the agonizingly slow and painful process to change the mindset of a true believer, himself. The incredible counter arguments one comes up with to explain the Soviet excesses and to justify the unjustifiable are so vivid that they can be applied today to the West's attitude towards Islamist terror almost without change. For this reason alone The Invisible Writing should be widely read, and not read only by nostalgic men in their 50s and students of political science, as one critic put it .
Sometimes a paragraph in a book illustrates better what transpired in a certain historical period than all the books on history one reads. Here is Koestler's take on German women, 1932:
During the carnival season Of 1932, Ehrendorf went to a dance and picked up a tall, pretty blonde. She wore a large swastika brooch on her breast, was about nineteen or twenty, gay, uninhibited and brimful of healthy animal spirits-in short, the ideal Hitler-Madchen of the Brave New World. After the dance, Ehrendorf persuaded her to go back with him to his flat, where she met his advances more than half-way. Then, at the climactic moment, the girl raised herself on one elbow, stretched out the other arm in the Roman salute, and breathed in a dying voice a fervent 'Heil Hitler'. Poor Ehrendorf nearly had a stroke. When he had recovered, the blonde sweetie explained to him that she and a bunch of her girl friends had taken a solemn vow, pledging themselves 'to remember the Fuehrer every time at the most sacred moment in a woman's life'.
The crux of the whole book is Koestler's disappointment with Communism and the agonizingly slow and painful process to change the mindset of a true believer, himself. The incredible counter arguments one comes up with to explain the Soviet excesses and to justify the unjustifiable are so vivid that they can be applied today to the West's attitude towards Islamist terror almost without change. For this reason alone The Invisible Writing should be widely read, and not read only by nostalgic men in their 50s and students of political science, as one critic put it .
Sometimes a paragraph in a book illustrates better what transpired in a certain historical period than all the books on history one reads. Here is Koestler's take on German women, 1932:
During the carnival season Of 1932, Ehrendorf went to a dance and picked up a tall, pretty blonde. She wore a large swastika brooch on her breast, was about nineteen or twenty, gay, uninhibited and brimful of healthy animal spirits-in short, the ideal Hitler-Madchen of the Brave New World. After the dance, Ehrendorf persuaded her to go back with him to his flat, where she met his advances more than half-way. Then, at the climactic moment, the girl raised herself on one elbow, stretched out the other arm in the Roman salute, and breathed in a dying voice a fervent 'Heil Hitler'. Poor Ehrendorf nearly had a stroke. When he had recovered, the blonde sweetie explained to him that she and a bunch of her girl friends had taken a solemn vow, pledging themselves 'to remember the Fuehrer every time at the most sacred moment in a woman's life'.
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