Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.

the bricks that built the houses

This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
   Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
   Read this if you like Very Good fiction.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

War and Peace in Kurdistan

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an overview of the hugely-damaging war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish liberation movement - chiefly the PKK, led by Öcalan himself. He outlines the history, the costs, and the sheer futility of this war, and reignites a call for a democratic and peaceful solution as he tries to explain is workable through mere extension of human rights and liberties to the Kurds of Turkey - this is couched in the development of democratically autonomous structures to safeguard Kurdish communities until such a time. Overall this booklet would be an interesting introduction to the Kurds' struggle and where it currently stands in context for readers whose interest I may have piqued but who may know nothing about Kurdistan and don't know where to start. Probably start here, if that's you.

Democratic Confederalism

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an outline of the core of his political philosophy - essentially the development of post-nationalist democratic structures that do not seek to overthrow or secede from existing states but to operate with complete autonomy to provide security and liberty for those living within their bounds. It has yielded some pretty interesting results in Syria. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sociopolitical options of pursuing peace in the Middle East, or generally revolutionary pragmatic ideas.

the Kurds of Iraq

This book by Mahir Aziz is a really interesting (and helpful for me academically) in-depth study of ethnonationalism in the semi-autonomous* Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring it in both geopolitical and historical contexts as well as going through a massive amount of data from a survey of university students on their views toward Kurdishness, Iraq, the predominant political parties, tribal culture, and so on.

* I'm writing this before September 25th, so the referendum on Kexit hasn't happened yet.

the Kurds & the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey & Iran

This book by Denise Natali was incredibly helpful to me academically and would probably be interesting to people super-keen on Kurdishness and deconstructions of nationalism. It traces the Kurds' nascent national identity from subordination under the Persian and Ottoman empires to how the colonial powers' establishment of Arab puppet states Iraq and Syria impacted them as a regional ethnic group, fragmenting their nationalism across borders, and thereafter she traces the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, couched in interested discussion of Kurdistan as an inherently transnational space and thereby contextualising the identity of Kurdishness as something that, even as a relatively straightforward ethno-nationalist movement, defies pre-existing nation-states.

A Modern History of the Kurds

This book by David McDowall is pretty much what it says on the tin, and probably the best single source I've yet used in my dissertation research when it comes to comprehensive overviews of Kurdish history across the twentieth century. Would recommend if you want a single book to provide that. For other, juicier or more contemporary, aspects of the Kurdish question, there are indubitably better books out there (as you've probably gathered from this spewage of backlog posts).

the PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains

This book by Paul White was another that played a huge role in informing key historical developments relevant to my dissertation - particularly, as the title suggests, the context for the origins and militant escalation of the PKK, and the impacts this had on the Turkish state and Kurdish region. White also tracks the attempts from the PKK to seek peaceful constructive options, and the failure of these efforts in light of a movement corrupted by ethnonationalist warlordism and widespread repression; alongside the ceasefires, the PKK's efforts to develop democratic, essentially feminist and inarguably post-nationalist strings to its bow for a more legitimate (and hopefully more winnable) struggle are given scrutiny as what started out as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla cell seems to have undergone a deep and incontrovertible paradigm shift. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the modern history of the Kurdish struggle, or more generally in the nature of terrorism and violent 'freedom' movements and how they constitute themselves.

Good Omens

This book, a novel co-written by none other than two of the biggest cleverest funniest most inventive authors in modern British pop-fantasy comedy - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - is, if you know who they are, exactly as good (if not better) as you'd expect such a collaborative work to be. It's a decently-long novel but I steamed through it in three days (of evening reading, as daytime-reading is still given over to dissertation non-fiction, as you may have gathered from the fact that this blog has basically become just about Kurdistan lately) because it's just so flipping excellent.
   To sum up what it's about - the end of the world is nigh, but the Antichrist becomes misplaced, and so an angel called Aziraphale, a demon called Crowley, the last living descendant of Agnes Nutter (a witch who predicted very nice-and-accurately all the things that would happen in the runup to all of this) and the last living descendant of the witch-finder who burned Agnes Nutter at the stake, all find themselves trying to prevent a cockup of literally apocalyptic dimensions. To say this novel is irreverent would be both completely technically true and a gross misjudgement of the value of being able to laugh at stuff - literally using the eschatological framework of the Biblical account from the prophesy of Revelation, adapted by Gaiman-Pratchett imagination to real-world workings that are as hilarious as they are commonsense and as thought-provoking as they are almost throwaway; this novel is just jam-packed with incredibly clever and incredibly funny characters, plot elements, turns of phrase, and just generally ridiculously well-concocted fictional happenings set against the backdrop of Christian world-endingness.
   I don't really have any strong thoughts or reactions to it - apart from that it's brilliant and you would probably love it, given a particular sense of humour. Like, if the idea that the apocalyptic horseman Famine would have spent most of the later-twentieth century developing middle-class hyper-health-conscious diet schemes and supplements to stave off boredom while waiting for the show to begin strikes you as funny, then this is the book for you.



Edit [August 16th]: I don't flipping believe it. I literally finished this book, that's been out for over a quarter of a century, less than a fortnight ago, and then something incredible like this happens... hopefully it will be a better screen-adaptation than Neverwhere.

[edit - July 2019]: I just had to sign up for a free Amazon Prime account to be able to see this, which much like the book I binged in a sitting or two. They did it justice. Still not as good as the book as these things almost never are but it comes closer than most. [additional edit - June 2026]: seasons two & three don't even come close. Gaiman continuing the story without Pratchett was not, in my view, worth doing.

A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State

This book by Meredith Tax was one of the best single sources I used for my dissertation. It involves a birds-eye historical overview of the Kurdish struggle and how this manifested differently across different nation-states, also exploring in-depth the conditions that led to the establishment and rise of the resistance-guerrilla movement PKK, particularly how this came to root itself so successfully in the popular consciousness in the context of severe Turkish repression. Throughout, the role played by women in the liberation movement is a key factor, couched in contextual discussion of the sociocultural repression faced by women in Kurdish society - but the PKK network's ideology places their struggle front and centre. Tax goes on to describe how self-governance initiatives in Turkish Kurdistan have been attempting to empower and educate women, and moreso the vital role taken on by female-led militias in Rojava (especially facing Daesh, whose bloodthirst and faux-religious fervour celebrates a brutally misogynistic ideology, and the violent opposition of the terrorist quasi-state by what is essentially an anarcho-feminist revolution surely illustrates the fundamentally different nature of a movement that seeks liberation through gender equality), particularly in the astounding victory at Kobani. This book cuts to the heart of the ideological and practical role gender plays in the current form of the Kurdish liberation movement, as will prove a challenging and enlightening read to anyone interested in the contemporary Middle-East, political freedom and equality, and opposing patriarchy and fascism.

Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan

This book, published by a research organisation called TATORT Kurdistan, comprises a series of in-depth interviews with activists and organisers and citizens in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where the ideology of democratic autonomy is being put into practice though establishing community-level self-governance councils, economic cooperatives, and educational and cultural institutions to help propagate itself as a movement. Gender equality and environmental sustainability are core focuses of the projects, and they strive to be as participatory and open as possible - however, uptake is slow among traditional under-developed civil society of the region, and the movement faces heavy repression from the Turkish state. Overall this is an enlightening book on some revolutionary happenings in a corner of the world rarely heard from in mainstream media.

Beat Poets

This book is, also* an 'Everyman's Library Pocket Poets' compendium, comprised of a wide selection of poetry - between one and eight per poet chosen from major figures in the 1950's/60's Beat** movement, including: Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso, Elise Cowen, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Leroi Jones, Lenore Kandel, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Joanna McClure, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Harold Norse, Frank O'Hara, Peter Orlovsky, Marie Ponsot, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen and John Wieners.***

   There are almost no poems in this collection that aren't at least good, and most are excellent, a few truly sublime; I feel like most of the names listed above are poets whom I now am inclined to track down individual books from and just drink in most of what they had to write. There's something heady and mad and utterly addictive about Beat poetry; sometimes it buzzes with a pure uncontainable joy, sometimes it slides hot serrated knives of on-the-nose feeling into your stomach, sometimes it is grotesque or hilarious or just strange but never completely impenetrable - it is revolutionary and boundary-shattering and brilliant and honestly I'm not sure whether to recommend it explicitly because it's also something that I'm sure a lot of people**** won't like.

   If you are anywhere near me in enthusiasm for the reading or writing of poetry though, I heartily recommend this book - or at the very least seeking out material by the names listed within its collection. Just something about the Beat style of poetry (see ** &/ ***) echoes of a deep unfiltered humanity and gusto that sets it considerably out from much other stuff. Something about this book in particular that I liked was that it also had (alongside Carmela Ciuraru's foreword which has some good insights into the movement overall) a section at the end with letters, reflections, statements, and such on poetics, from Donald Allen, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Peter Orlovsky - these are such idiosyncratic and purposeful bits that they can be mulled over as much of any of the poems in here, and moreover are not unhelpful in informing how one thinks about the production and reception of poetry, especially in the Beat style and form.

   Anyway that's it.

   Thnak you

* This one was too.

** My thirteen-year-old brother upon seeing the title of this volume was amused & excited as he thought it was a book inciting its readers to literally "beat poets". #edgy

*** So whoever curated this book, which I could find out probably from the inside cover apart from I don't care as it's not the point the poetry is obviously the point, either has the advantage of historical oversight of Beat as an artistic movement, or else disagrees on the finer points of its defined-included-crowd with Kerouac - who writes of "the new American poetry as typified by the SF Renaissance (which means Ginsberg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, Corso, McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen I guess)". It's cool that they were all mates, or at least a bunch of them.
   The more you read of each you can see friendships and influences overlapping and seeping into each others' work, from Allen in Howl harking back to slithers of anecdote so bizarrely specific that they seem like they must have happened during one of their mad adventures because they also have their echoes in Jack's landmark novel On the Road, or fragments of abstract little nonsense that just smells like something one of them said to another when they were off on a jazz-and-drug-fuelled romp across the night and some weird turn of phrase just set itself in their memory such that it encapsulated something that would be perhaps incommunicable except in the shadowball haze of capturing that short sequence of words like a butterfly in a jar and squashing it down onto a page in a creative frenzy not caring whether the reader will entirely 'get it' because they don't need to and it sounds cool anyway and the spontaneity of it, the haphazard whimsical zigzags of thought and image and sound, works regardless, if uninterpretable it will simply be put down to artistic ambiguity and hailed as genius, which it may well be, but one unobserved, unpolished, raw and joyful and gutspilling as the true heart of the Beat Movement and its revolutionary approach to poetry was.

**** I mean, a lot of people don't really like poetry at all. A lot of people don't even read for fun. A lot of people would be genuinely happier in a shopping mall than an art gallery. These people do not read my blog (well, nobody does) so I feel somewhat vindicated in whinging about this utterly blinkered segment of the human population, who have never and possibly never will fully exercise or develop their aesthetic, let alone creative, capacities - because there are so many things it is easier to consume than art, which ultimately is not even something we consume but something we approach tentatively like a wild animal, gaze in the eye, wonder, speculate, ponder, meditate, only for it to run away into the bushes and leave us just slightly more aware of our smallness of self. I say this like the only value of art is the truly sublime experience but in all honesty there are many stripes of art and to start drawing distinctions is needlessly elitist - I enjoy mainstream cinema as much as anyone (or would were I not constantly picking films apart for their patriarchal-capitalist-imperialist biases during viewing). Whatever. I literally just said I feel vindicated in my whinges - why launch into recursive defense? People who can derive more satisfaction from buying a pair of trainers than, say, reading a relatively fresh accessible powerful poem, you baffle me and yet you are no mystery at all.

the Kurds of Syria

This book by Harriet Allsopp is an in-depth exploration of the sociopolitical repression faced by Kurds in Syria, also comprising detailed portraits of Kurdish political parties active there and the effects of this repressive environment on their capacity for radical or vocal opposition. It would be a relatively useful read for anyone interested in the Rojava Revolution, as this book lays out a rich and complex sub-national historical context for the events that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011.

the Kurdish National Movement: its Origins and Development

This book by Wadie Jwaideh is an excellently thorough walkthrough of exactly the topic described by its title. Unfortunately, it is also pretty old - it was written as a doctorate thesis in 1959, two years before the guy who wrote the foreword to this book claims the Kurdish nationalist movement properly took off (and the PKK, probably the biggest player in the modern history of Kurdish nationalism, weren't formed for another nineteen years); so even if Kurdish issues fascinate you, frankly I'm not sure why you'd read this one compared to more recent books about their struggle - unless you were, like me, doing a super in-depth academic study with Kurdishness at the centre of it.
   Still, as you can probably tell by the fact that it's getting a post,* I found this informative, useful, and very well-structured - genuinely learned loads of stuff from Long Ago that still helpfully resonates with more contemporary developments. History is always great fun to read too - it's like going through current events on fast-forward, apart from the actual tone and caliber of those events subtly shifts the further back you go, because, like, history, innit. And so the grandeur of the achievements of great persons, placed into the immensely-grander complex webs of context in which they must invariably occur, seem so strange and small, enormous struggles condensed for brevity and laid out cold as mere memory, words on a page. If you want a small taster of this kind of Ozymandian ennui, just google (don't bother actually I'll wikilink it) Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji.***

* That means I read the whole book, which is not the norm for books I'm only reading for research for an essay. But dissertations, as I am finding, are different beasts entirely, if only due to scale; much like having gotten used to writing pickles and now having a full-size courgette demanded of you. Also, the topic is super interesting and I've got a month and a half left** so am taking the luxury of imbibing a ridiculously large quantity of source material from which to whittle out support for my arguments.

** As compared to my typical position when writing essays, which is to do all the reading in a week or two and write it up in a coffee-and-bread-and-humus-and-satsuma-fuelled thirty-six hour stint in the open-all-day library. But dissertations are way too long to do that. And the IC is closed over summer, which is probably just as well.

*** Regardless of how adept or inept a leader they may actually be, I find myself unable to not find something enthralling about historical figures who seem to make it their mission to cause as much irk to great powers as they can while going about their own aims. Not that Barzanji necessarily did, but from the way Jwaideh recounted his exploits, complete with snippets from the statements and letters of increasingly confused and irritated British colonial officers, he certainly did a bit.

the Kurdish Spring

This book by David Phillips is one of the many books in the pile I assembled over a month ago for my dissertation project about the Rojava revolution and its implications. It's also the first of these (so far*) that I've read all the way through, as it just kept yielding good points for my notes. It's also due back at the library TODAY, so excuse me for avoiding doing anywhere near a properly in-depth post about it - but since I'll be reading so many other books about the Kurdish question and its surrounding social, historical, ideological, and geopolitical contexts, there will be plenty of space in future posts to give this enormous and complex and fascinating topic more blogroom,** as right now my priority is to return this book to the inter-library loans bin so I don't get fined.***

   Anyway, the book itself. It's a pretty good introduction to the current state of affairs for Kurdistan as an overall region, but is largely focussed on the semi-autonomous Iraqi region in terms of in-depth considerations of context and prospects. The first chapter lays out a clear historical picture of how, in the scrabbling between Britain and France to carve up the remains of the collapsed Ottoman empire, Kurdish demands for national sovereignty were thoroughly neglected and they ended up as a split stateless minority, lumped between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The next four chapters explore how in each of these countries, since then, the Kurds have been quite consistently and horrendously marginalised, their ethnic and linguistic and cultural traditions suffering attempts by the despotic regimes that took root in the post-colonial Middle-Eastern world to be entirely stamped out and denied, and efforts by Kurds in each of these countries to assert their own identity and independence has been repressed (through political dominance, as in the Iranian theocracy, or through all-out guerrilla warfare, as in the PKK's clashes with the Turkish state since the late 1970s). Though things may be slowly changing: Phillips then considers the relative (compared to other nation state projects in the region) success of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, the relatively promising peace process being negotiated between the Turkish state and the imprisoned leader of the PKK, the ongoing (if tough) capacity for democratic reform in Iran, and the phoenix-like situation of the Syrian Kurds - who have, in the wake of the state collapsing into civil war, taken initiative (mobilised in large part by the PYD) in self-organising male and female militia forces, reclaiming as much territory as they can safely control from the forces of Daesh, and running it through bottom-up democratically autonomous structures that throw into question the entire necessity of centralised states. The final three chapters look at the potential future for the Iraqi region, which is arguably the 'most like' a currently existing independent Kurdistan, and consider how it may continue on its path to becoming this, and what challenges still may lie ahead.****

   Phillips writes accessibly and makes of an incredibly convoluted subject a book that most people already vaguely familiar with the current lay of the Middle East could get to grips with. However, I think his focus on the KRG rather than Rojava as the key locus of Kurdish hope for independence is misplaced, and though he makes some very balanced and reasonable conclusions, at the end of the day he's neglected the more radical and revolutionary aspect of the current Kurdish struggle, and in my view, if a genuine 'spring' of freedom and independence is emergent anywhere, it is from West Kurdistan that such momentum will be developed to propel the Kurdish people forwards.*****

* Okay, except Homage to Catalonia, but that was more like recreational reading that I managed to squeeze a few more-or-less relevant parallels from which I probably won't even end up using, rather than being an actual proper source.

** I might even upload my finished dissertation onto here as a pdf, since it will essentially be comprised of my thoughts on a load of books (well, and journal papers)... or is that needlessly self-indulgent academic whiffery? Probably. Dunno. I'll decide when it's done.

*** Apparently I went over my borrowing limit, and the library staff have been very nice and just let me do so as it's summer (and who else is going to be taking out thirty or so books about Kurdistan, ecofeminism, anti-hierarchical sociology, and the general muck that is Middle-Eastern geopolitics? exactly) but I still don't want to push it.

**** Spoiler: they include pretty much every other major regional power. And America.

***** The KRG has, in my view, made too many geopolitical concessions to regional powers (e.g. Turkey) who ultimately don't want the Kurdish struggle to succeed. Rojava has not and probably will not ask anyone any permission for any of what they're doing - why should they when they're fending off Daesh?

Homage to Catalonia

This book, an eyewitness account of a small sliver of the Spanish civil war told by George Orwell, is probably my favourite of his books that I've read yet. I read it because of the admittedly-not-as-extensive-as-I'd-hoped parallels between the circumstances of Catalonia's workers' revolution (driven as much by anarchists as communists) in the midst of a complex civil war and the current situation in Rojava - and, somewhat appropriately, read the bulk of it during four days spent at a grassroots environmentalist training camp last week.
   It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made  and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
   I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.



* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.

** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.

*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?