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A review by michaelstearns
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
1.0
[First, a note about Goodreads star ratings: Some people on Goodreads don't really "get" the one-star review. A single star means simply that for whatever reason, you didn't like a book. That's all. Not that you hated it, not that you loathed it—a single star is not a black hole of antipathy—but just a note that a book didn't satisfy you in some deeper sense. It's not an objective rating of quality, but all about subjective response. So when I give a book one star, it's not that I think I'm speaking for the entirety of western readership. It's just me, saying I didn't care for a book.]
I originally posted a brief rating of this book years ago, and some asshat responded by attacking me and my tastes. That review has disappeared—don't remember whether I deleted it or whether one of the Goodreads librarians took down the comment threat. Regardless, considering that I'd pretty much skimmed the second half of the book back in 2004, I thought it worth rereading the book to see if my feelings about it had changed. And they haven't.
Look, I love Martin Amis. I do. I think his best books partake of all kinds of genius, among them a first-rate analytical mind and a nimble writerly voice capable of linguistic hijinks as well as emotional subtleties. But I felt that Koba the Dread was a chore six years ago, and I still feel that way.
The gist of the book is this: Not enough is made of the nearly incomprehensible horrors of Bolshevism, first in its Leninist incarnation and then in the refined-in-terms-of-killing-the-populace-form that was Stalinism. We all know of the death camps of the Third Reich, and can even name them with some knowledge of what happened there. We've all seen Schindler's List. But there is not an equivalent awareness of the horrors that transpired in Russia after the revolution of 1917.
In large part, Amis's book functions as a gloss on the atrocities of the era. The scholarship here is impeccable—he's ransacked whole shelves of Soviet camp literature and histories to put together this 280 page march of misery. It's horrifying stuff. I read the first Gulag Archipelago in high school, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and that is as nothing to the full roster of ugliness laid out in this book. Amis conveys it all in a cool burn, his fury held barely in check but always sensed in the extremities of the writing. (His stylistic tics, present in all of his novels, are at their worst when he is feeling righteous. The self-conscious effects sometimes almost draw attention away from the things he is writing about.)
So far, so good. There are fatter books that cover the same material—his family friend Robert Conquest is one of the main authorities, as well as Solzhenitsyn and too many others to list here. Those books opt for a different tone, trusting that the facts and accounts will suffice to get the horror across. But maybe Amis's book will reach a wider audience, and maybe that's why he wrote it.
But I don't know that I believe that. And I guess it is Amis's reasons for writing the book that bothered me the most. Who is he writing this for? Who is he attacking? Because the book feels like a sustained attack on some strawman apologist for the Soviet Union who hasn't existed since the mid-eighties. Back then, in the eighties, I worked in USC's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and even then, the depredations of the Soviet Union were pretty well documented. The number dead were estimated to be about 15 million back then, but as the Soviet Union fell and more records were released, the numbers steadily climbed upward. And the silences that met these accounts were those of people horrified to a place beyond words. Hard to know how to respond, but at any rate, by the turn of the millennium, the horrors were pretty well known. And no one was standing as the champion for that old regime that murdered its populace.
So who is this book for? There is a troubling bit of "memoir" appended to this book, an open letter to Christopher Hitchens taking him to task for his romantic attachments to the old Soviet Union. And perhaps that is who this is for—perhaps it is a settling of scores of an ill-considered intellectual stance held by Amis's dear friends.
But I don't know that that is reason enough for this book, and I don't know that it is an appropriate use of the twenty million dead (more). Amis's cataloging of the horrors is infallible; it's the reason behind it that made me uncomfortable, then and now.
So: one star. I didn't like it. I respect it, but I didn't like it then, and I didn't like it upon rereading it.
I originally posted a brief rating of this book years ago, and some asshat responded by attacking me and my tastes. That review has disappeared—don't remember whether I deleted it or whether one of the Goodreads librarians took down the comment threat. Regardless, considering that I'd pretty much skimmed the second half of the book back in 2004, I thought it worth rereading the book to see if my feelings about it had changed. And they haven't.
Look, I love Martin Amis. I do. I think his best books partake of all kinds of genius, among them a first-rate analytical mind and a nimble writerly voice capable of linguistic hijinks as well as emotional subtleties. But I felt that Koba the Dread was a chore six years ago, and I still feel that way.
The gist of the book is this: Not enough is made of the nearly incomprehensible horrors of Bolshevism, first in its Leninist incarnation and then in the refined-in-terms-of-killing-the-populace-form that was Stalinism. We all know of the death camps of the Third Reich, and can even name them with some knowledge of what happened there. We've all seen Schindler's List. But there is not an equivalent awareness of the horrors that transpired in Russia after the revolution of 1917.
In large part, Amis's book functions as a gloss on the atrocities of the era. The scholarship here is impeccable—he's ransacked whole shelves of Soviet camp literature and histories to put together this 280 page march of misery. It's horrifying stuff. I read the first Gulag Archipelago in high school, along with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and that is as nothing to the full roster of ugliness laid out in this book. Amis conveys it all in a cool burn, his fury held barely in check but always sensed in the extremities of the writing. (His stylistic tics, present in all of his novels, are at their worst when he is feeling righteous. The self-conscious effects sometimes almost draw attention away from the things he is writing about.)
So far, so good. There are fatter books that cover the same material—his family friend Robert Conquest is one of the main authorities, as well as Solzhenitsyn and too many others to list here. Those books opt for a different tone, trusting that the facts and accounts will suffice to get the horror across. But maybe Amis's book will reach a wider audience, and maybe that's why he wrote it.
But I don't know that I believe that. And I guess it is Amis's reasons for writing the book that bothered me the most. Who is he writing this for? Who is he attacking? Because the book feels like a sustained attack on some strawman apologist for the Soviet Union who hasn't existed since the mid-eighties. Back then, in the eighties, I worked in USC's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and even then, the depredations of the Soviet Union were pretty well documented. The number dead were estimated to be about 15 million back then, but as the Soviet Union fell and more records were released, the numbers steadily climbed upward. And the silences that met these accounts were those of people horrified to a place beyond words. Hard to know how to respond, but at any rate, by the turn of the millennium, the horrors were pretty well known. And no one was standing as the champion for that old regime that murdered its populace.
So who is this book for? There is a troubling bit of "memoir" appended to this book, an open letter to Christopher Hitchens taking him to task for his romantic attachments to the old Soviet Union. And perhaps that is who this is for—perhaps it is a settling of scores of an ill-considered intellectual stance held by Amis's dear friends.
But I don't know that that is reason enough for this book, and I don't know that it is an appropriate use of the twenty million dead (more). Amis's cataloging of the horrors is infallible; it's the reason behind it that made me uncomfortable, then and now.
So: one star. I didn't like it. I respect it, but I didn't like it then, and I didn't like it upon rereading it.