Where Modernism and Socialism went wrong
– or:Why I’m glad I come from the slums of Manchester
I’m reading Gabriel Josipovici's fascinating book on modernism at the moment. To my shame, I've never read any of Josipovici's novels but in this book at least, he writes fluidly, vibrantly and with flashes of brilliance and panache. The book is very good at describing that modernist moment when many old certainties began to disappear and artists began to explore their minds for new answers.- what was to be done now that man was God? The gap between aspiration and some divine achievement. (Warning – don’t try that at home!). He's particularly good at explaining why, for example, Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for that matter, were so desperate to make a leap into something, anything, now that the new age was upon them and a vague notion of unlimited freedom beckoned. (Warning! ..etc)
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