Unforgiving years - Victor Serge

A New York Review Books Original

Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying
journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge's
final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most
ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer's works.

The
book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements
of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the
Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets
of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future.
Part two finds D's friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense
of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying
life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines,
Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where
the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico,
in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are
reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their
modern era.

A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion,
and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered
masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.