PARTISAN REVIEW
RETURN FROM UTOPIA
THE BURNED BRAMBLE. By M..
nes
Sperber. Doubled..
y. $3 .95.
Mr. Sperber's novel, which has moved Arthur Koestler to
critical comments so lyrical they scan and which has been hailed by
Upton Sinclair as a modern classic, is a massive and most uneven book
that somehow rises above all its manifest flaws and compels one to
acknowledge it as a work of considerable force and dignity, one de–
serving comparison with Koestler's own best books, with George Orwell's,
with Lionel Trilling's
The Middle of the Journ ey,
and with Victor Serge's
fine, neglected novel,
The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
As a work of the
imagination, it has, or seems to have, few of the merits we associate
with those books. It is flabbily constructed, relentlessly didactic, and,
to my mind, quite unsteady in direction. Sperber is writing about the
world of the German Communist Party between 1931 and 1937. His
German Communists, all of whom end up as ex-Communists or dead
Communists, are distinguishable one from another by the nature and
degree of their political commitments but not by very much else. The
rest of his characters are conveniences of plot-wives for husbands,
husbands for wives, torturers for torture scenes, and Peter Lorre creeps
for the brief melodramas of Central European politics that are staged
every so often in this fundamentally philosophical novel.
Yet, for all of that, this is a deeply affecting book. In a recent
article on the literature of apostasy in the New York
Times,
Sperber
pointed out that "Mitya Karamazov, according to the usual standards of
fiction, is a much more interesting and better profiled figure than his
brother Ivan. Yet the really important figures of what many reviewers
called a badly constructed, confused, and terribly verbose novel of
crime are Ivan, Father Zossima, and Alyosha." This, of course, is true,
and while I am not quite prepared to say that
The Burned Bramble
is
as monumental a book as
The Brothers Karamazov
(Sperber, I hasten
to add, was making no such suggestion himself) it, too, triumphs over
its weaknesses and is ful! of moral insight and eloquence.
If
its char–
acters are fuzzily drawn, they are neither uninteresting nor unimportant.
And even by the conventional standards, Sperber has gifts of a high
order. His picture of Schuschnigg's war on the Viennese workers in 1934
is perhaps the best ever done; he renders the atmosphere of the refugee
community in Prague in the late 'thirties with great skill, making it a
symbol of all the refugee communities where men "quickly forget the
laws of growth," where all minds see the future only as a road back to
