⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Red Plenty by Spufford
| Full Title | Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream |
|---|---|
| Authors | Francis Spufford |
| Year Published | 2010 |
| Date Read | August 20, 2018 |
| Rating | 5/5 stars |
I saw this book recommended in a comment on Hacker News, and originally decided to pick it up because I wanted to get a more emotional telling of this era, primarily to give me context to the stories of parents’ own experiences with communism in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s-1990s. I was surprised at how much I liked the book.
Primarily, I was surprised that I hadn’t seen this format of storytelling before - obviously there are plenty of strict fiction / non-fiction books, and a solid amount of books that fall in the fuzzy middle of ‘based on true events.’ But I haven’t seen any books in that last category that both try to tell an interesting story for the reader and also provide footnotes at the end that explain, in detail, what liberties the author has taken to make the narrative more interesting. This I think is the biggest factor in my enjoyment of the book.
The actual content was also handled in a pleasing way. Spufford creates a few parallel stories that
he comes back to during different sections of the book. Some are only one-off. The way that the stories are organized, however, allows the author to leave the narrative of one setting and come back to it much further in the future, transporting the reader to when something interesting is happening. In a normal fiction book you wouldn’t need to do this (since you can just arbitrarily have events happen in a way that is fortuitous to storytelling), but in this kind of book it’s important for the reader that the dates match the chronology in real-life time. I thought this particular way of handling the necessary time discontinuity / event discontinuity was well done.
Overall, I’d recommend Red Plenty to anyone wanting to get a better feel of the Soviet promise. I came away from it largely succeeding in my goal.