the road book review

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The Road rings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wishes to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life.

Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003WUYORA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics (September 28, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 28, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1327 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages
Reviewer: Lonya53
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.
Review: Christina Georgina Rossetti.Every now and again I come across a passage in a book that I immediately perceive to be the `emotional core' of the book. In the case of "The Road", a collection of stories and other writings by Vasily Grossman, I came across a passage that I thought served not as the `core' of the book but, rather, one that, instead, placed a bookmark on the beginning of the road that Grossman travelled as a writer and as a man.The passage is found in "The Hell of Treblinka". Grossman, who was likely the first reporter to view and write about the horrors of the Nazi death camps, wrote this piece shortly after the liberation of Treblinka. It is a stunning piece of writing. Toward the end of the article, Grossman tries to make sense of things. He asks: "A particular kind of State does not appear out of nowhere. What engenders a particular regime is the material and ideological relations existing among a country's citizens. It is to these material and ideological relations that we need to devote serious thought; the nature of these relations is what should appall us."When Grossman wrote this article, in September 1944 it was clear that his focus was solely on the Nazi death machine and the active and passive acceptance of that regime by Germany's own citizens. But, by the end of his life Grossman's focus evolved. In "The Hell of Treblinka" he looked at the material and ideological relations existing amongst the citizens of other countries, specifically Germany. By the time he wrote Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) and Everything Flows (New York Review Books Classics) his focus had turned inward, toward his own country and people. Neither book was published during Grossman's lifetime because he had the audacity to suggest that Stalinism and Hitlerism were but two sides of the same coin. He turned his focus toward the idea of freedom and to the entirely subversive (in the context of the USSR) concept that any ruler, be it Stalin, Lenin, or Hitler, who deprived people of freedom and dignity bore more similarities to each other than differences. His statement in Everything Flows that: "[n]o matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and, as such, will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free" stands as a testament to the place that Grossman's road led him.For me, the brilliance of the short stories and articles set out in "The Road" lies in the fact that they allow the reader to follow Grossman as he set out on his literary and lifes journey. As edited and translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Grossman's writings are set out in chronological order. We see his earliest writings from the 1930s. Grossman's writing style was still a work in progress and you can see him work on finding a style that was at once his own but still acceptable to the apparatchiks that controlled and approved all writings for publication. The second part, those stories and articles set during the War, see Grossman truly emerge. As set out on the excellent introductions to each section and the meticulous end notes written by the Chandlers, the war and the Shoah were searing experiences for Grossman. Apart from his coverage of the horrors of Stalingrad and Treblinka, Grossman learned that his mother had been murdered in the early months of the war in her home town of Berdichev. Finally, we see his post war stories in the 50s and early 60s before his death.By the time we get to those later stories, particularly "The Road" and "The Dog", we begin to see the themes of life, fate, and freedom mature and ripen. Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote that "a person with inner freedom, memory, and fear is that reed, that twig that changes the direction of a rushing river." It seems to me, after reading this book that Grossman became absorbed with that sense of inner freedom, the ability of individuals to live as free men and women even in a society that denies them their outer freedom.In summary, Vasily Grossman's The Road serves as a reminder of a man who put his life and fate into his writing and left a body of work behind that I would hope will get as much exposure as possible. I would add that this compilation stands alone, due in no small part to the editing and notes provided by the Chandlers. It can be enjoyed however even if you have not read Life and Fate or Everything Flows. However, for me, reading those books first enabled me to more fully appreciate the writings in The Road. I can only recommend all of these books and assure you that I think the reader will be rewarded if they do so.L Fleisig

Reviewer: T. Kasuboski
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Tremendously powerful collection of some of Grossman's most personal, harrowing, bleak, and brilliant writing....Essential!!!
Review: A truly essential 300+ page collection (plus nearly another 100 pages of appendix, notes, bibliography, etc.) of various writings by the masterful Russian author Vasily Grossman (author of the masterpiece Life And Fate, a novel based on Grossman's own experiences in the USSR which was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and eventually published to worldwide acclaim). "The Road" is exactly as described in the subtitle: a collection of stories, journalism, and essays. Some of these pieces are quite renowned and famous such as "The Hell Of Treblinka", one of the first accounts of the infamous Nazi death-camp. Consisting of 5 parts the book contains Part One: The 1930's, featuring three selections most notably "In The Town of Berdichev" one of Grossman's earliest successes and reckonings with the realities of war. Part Two: The War, The Shoah contains both biographically-based fiction as well as journalistic pieces such as "The Hell Of Treblinka". Part Three: Later Stories includes 6 stories including the extraordinary "Mama" (dealing with the life of an adopted girl during Stalin's purges in the 1930's) as well as the bleak and horrifying story "The Road". Part Four: Three Letters consists of Grossman's writings to his deceased mother (killed by Nazi forces). These letters are harrowing, extremely personal, and beautiful though tragic examples of Grossman's inner-strength, vulnerability, feelings of guilt, and will. All personality traits which allowed him to produce writing of the quality of a novel such as Life And Fate. Part 5: Eternal Rest contains appendixes, afterwords, chronology, notes, etc., which round this magnificent collection off nearly perfectly. For those who love Life And Fate or Everything Flows this collection is an essential collection. It contains much very rare material translated with the highest degree of scholarship and contains some of Grossman's most intimate and powerful writing. It also serves as a unintended "supplement" at times to Life And Fate, allowing readers who love that work further insight into its authors life, mind, and style. While some of the material contained within this collection is available elsewhere, much is not, making The Road an essential addition to any Grossman collection. As a collection, editor Robert Chandler has created an extremely powerful work which in many ways stands on its own as one of the finest windows in Grossman's personal world and that of all humans. A truly magnificent anthology of one of the 20th Century's greatest writers.

Reviewer: Don Morris
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A must for Grossman fans
Review: These stories will be of interest to any Grossman fan. Each is unique and opens up the personalities, strengths and fears of the people involved. I enjoyed the book very much and would strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in Russia and Grossman's life.

Reviewer: zorba
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: One of the Best Writers of Our Times
Review: If I were to read Grossman's article "The Hell of Treblinka" every single day for the rest of my life, I would not fail to be shocked every one of those days by the simply unimaginable evil that took place at this Nazi death camp, which Grossman calls, simply, "the executioner's block." In unadorned, declarative sentences this brilliant writer chronicles the absolute horror of Treblinka. But, if you've read Grossman's two other classics, "Life and Fate" and "Everything Flows" you know that he must be one of the best authors of the Twentieth Century. "The Road" takes its name from a short story within the book, which is a compendium of Grossman literary and journalistic odds and ends. Most are unfailingly compelling and evocative of the World War II and immediate post-war Soviet era. This is an important and compelling book. I believe every human being should read "The Hell of Treblinka." And although that and other pieces in this volume deal with horror and sadness, there also is some lightness and humor. Grossman's artistry was not fully appreciated outside Russia until fairly recently. We are fortunate to have available the works, however late, of this towering literary figure.

Reviewer: paul m
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Robert Chandler is obviously a gifted translator not merely translating words but giving us the feeling of being in the book. I’ve read “life and fate” and it’s the same - like paddling a canoe on a still lake - whilst I’ve read “crime and punishment” and “karamazov” which are obviously marvelous they’re more of a challenge as the translation doesn’t paddle like Chandlers’ - the stories in “The Road” are riveting and must be told

Reviewer: Brian Fawcett
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Vasily Grossman is the greatest of all the Soviet-era writers, and with Isaac Babel, the most courageous. Life and Fate is a remarkable book. This book will explain just how great and remarkable an achievement it was.

Reviewer: I. Jones
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I’ve read several books by Vasily Grossman, going back to Life and Fate about ten years ago, quickly followed by Everything Flows, A Writer at War and The Road. I then had an inexplicable Grossman gap of about a decade till I read Stalingrad last Christmas. Maybe that gap was because it took years for Grossman’s translators to get together a publishable edition of the prequel to Life and Fate.Anyway, this year I somehow acquired a new edition of The Road, a collection of Grossman’s short stories, journalism and letters from the 1930s to the 1960s. The centrepiece is the author’s description of the extermination camp at Treblinka (a different translation appears in A Writer at War). This horrendous account was written very soon after Grossman visited Treblinka and is based on the testimony of some of the very few survivors as well as local people that Grossman was able to interview as a war correspondent for the Red Star. The editors note that the account is not entirely accurate, as much of the detail about how the camp was run only became apparent through later research, and, of course, the Nuremburg Trials. However, Grossman’s is one of the earliest, if not the earliest published account of the mechanics of the Shoah. The fact that the tone is so dispassionate makes it all the rawer and more terrifying.The first short story is set in Berdichev, but twenty years earlier, during the civil war. Grossman is often seen has being excessively sentimental about maternal love, but in this story a young mother chooses revolution over motherhood and leaves her new-born baby with an old couple while she rushes off to fight for communism. That story was written in the 1930s when Grossman was still making a name for himself as a patriotic pro-Soviet writer.The tone changes in the 1940s with stories such as the The Old Man and The Teacher, both about the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. In The Teacher, the Jews of the town are rounded up and marched to a ravine for extermination by bullet in the back of the head. The remaining townsfolk look on with a mixture of fear and indifference. Some have collaborated, and they are the ones who fear for the future as at the end of the story we hear of the partisans from the forest who are about to liberate the town.In this edition you also get two short, heart-breaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother nine years and twenty years after her death. She was murdered in their hometown of Berdichev in September 1941. Grossman only confirmed her death in 1944, though he must have guessed long before that she was dead, and he death haunted him for the rest of his life as he blamed himself for not doing enough to get her evacuated before the town fell to the Nazis.It is important to note that this is not simply a book about sorrow and suffering. It is a book about the indomitability of the human spirit, and that innate resilience, the will to go on living, is perhaps best exemplified in The Road, a story about a mule, and The Dog, which as the title suggests, is about a dog. The mule survives the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The dog survives being shot into space on a rocket.This edition has a helpful introduction to each section, detailed notes and suggestions for further reading. The introductions show what a tough life Grossman had. Of course that would have been the case for most of his compatriots living between the 1900s and the 1960s. But Grossman’s life was made additionally tough because he was a Jew and because he was a writer of integrity. The reader is reminded that there may well have been a second Holocaust, in the Soviet Union of the 1950s. All the signs are that Stalin was gearing up for what would at the very least have been a major anti-Jewish pogrom in the early 50s. Grossman himself was probably heading for the Gulag or the firing squad when Stalin had the good sense to die in 1953. Fortunately, the death of the dictator meant that Grossman survived for another decade and produced Life and Fate.

Reviewer: J C Greenway
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The Road is a collection of Vasily Grossman’s short stories, essays and journalism. It is a good place to start if you haven’t read anything by him before, or as an accompaniment if you are familiar with the longer works. It features writing from the 1930s, the War years and post-war, with much of his fiction based on events that he had witnessed. As well as mentioning the late 1930s terror, the stories also refer to the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, using an experience that is also recorded in Grossman’s journalism from the time, and it is the way his fiction is always rooted in things he had heard about or experienced himself that makes his books such vivid reads, as well as causing so many headaches for his publishers.

Reviewer: Rattiman
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Vasily Grossman's journalism is direct and does not spare the reader. Even taken by itself, his description of Treblinka - based on his being with the Red army unit who liberated the camp plus many interviews with former inmates - makes this book worth reading.For a man whose mother had been liquidated by Himmler's einsatzgruppen earlier in the war his writing maintains an extraordinary unblinking objectivity.Nor is his sorrowful enquiry directed in only one direction: there is much interesting, and even intimate, detail about the senior figures caught up in (or perpetrating) Stalin's purges.Some of his short fictional stories seem a little trite, but perhaps this is because they were published under a regime where real events had to be cloaked in allegory.Overall a disturbing window on the 1930s and 40s through Russian eyes.