Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Darkness at Noon
Book Review: How dark can it be that one may still see the light?
Summary: 5 Stars
This chilling yet epic novel is a true testament to what literature can be. It expresses both brilliant insites into the haunts of totallitarian regeims and the triumph, or what of it does and/or can develop, behind the gloomy curtain of opressive post-Stalin Russia. It is a must read, a genuine classic that can't be missed in the scale of the universeBook Review: I thought it was marvelous....
Summary: 5 Stars
The horror that was the Stalinist Great Terror have never been captured with such emotion, tragedy, and...darkness. The brilliance of this novel lies in that fact that it is able to make strong intellectual statements while showing the moral failure of a whole world. Emotion and philosophy come togeather in a way that is unsurpassed. What scholars have come to understand about the Great Terror in recent years is that we cannot understand why it happened by studying history. One must ask philosophical and moral questions to understand this destruction of an enitre universe. Beats 1984, Anthem, and Brave New World all to hell...Book Review: Idealism Gone Awry
Summary: 4 Stars
Darkness at Noon A. KoestlerSpare and uncompromising as its solitarily confined hero, this tale of a once gung-ho, now thoroughly disillusioned revolutionary, Rubashov is strangely haunting. Koestler, known also for his belief in the human right to suicide, his own suicide with his wife, and his forays into the history and theory of biology, delves into the mental depths of his man on death row who has in the end chosen compassion and humanity over the humorlessness and cleverness of the more-than-human revolutionary machine. Rubashov is offered a reprieve if he will only disavow his "oppositional tendencies" and the actions, some of them framed, he has supposedly committed. As his stoicism and irony confront the ideological racionation of the Soviet state, he must confront the hubris of reason hypertrophying in the belly of the state beast; he must deal with the higher, or lower, irony of revolutionary fervor-based on the same sort of reason he applies in his own analyses-gone fatally wrong. Although the action is confined largely to the prison cell of Koestler's composite character (based on a number of men Koestler knew), flashbacks and hope allow us fleeting escape from the oncoming freight train of Death. The last line is brilliant and the whole book contains a frightening ring of truth.
Book Review: Interesting, not gripping
Summary: 3 Stars
Maybe the best aspect of this book is that we root for Rubashov, the former Communist party leader turned denounced "counterrevolutionary", without seeming to realize that he's simply fighting over methods, not beliefs. His trial comes about because he so fervently wants Communism and the inevitable march of HIstory, and is convinced that the current regime has stalled that march; his internal struggle is mostly about coming to grips with being punished for his sincere belief in the same principles that his torturers hold true; his regret in the end is that he can't live to flesh out a new kind of revolutionary theory he begins to hatch in prison. It's only at the very end that he comes around to what most readers think of as "our side", seeing himself as an individual and fully wondering if he hadn't been on the wrong end of the struggle all along.
Other than this twist, though, I wasn't pulled into the book as I thought I would be. The process of breaking down Rubashov is an intellectual one, a slow hammering down of beliefs, and it reads like one: objectively fascinating, but not gripping drama that a Vietnam prison narrative might offer with its physical hardships. It may perhaps be so hard to imagine the kind of rigor of belief that Rubashov holds that it's tough to imagine the strain of having those beliefs suddenly become your death sentence. In the end, it means that the reader is just a bit too distant from the action, and by the time the narrative picks up at the very end, it's too late. Koestler's book is well-written and is a great historical lesson, but still leaves much to be desired.
Book Review: Is one man's life worth more than another's?
Summary: 5 Stars
All through this book I thought about a medieval contraption I had once read about. It was a box designed to imprison somebody, but the box was too short for the prisoner to stand and not long enough for the prisoner to lie down. It is a cruel irony that the man who designed this contraption was the first man to be sentenced to it.Such is the irony of Rubashov's imprisonment, that this man who had stood by as his friends and lover were wrongfully accused and convicted would eventually suffer the same fate himself. That the same party that he had worked his life to build would one day turn on him. I enjoyed this book a lot. Koestler's book lays out a wonderful panorama of what happens when we put mankind above man, while attesting that the ends always to justify the means.