Zeese Papanikolas' 3 favorite reads in 2023

Why do utopias fail? Why does the world of human dignity and equality they aspire to so often ossify into a mechanism of repression that strangles the very people revolutionaries attempted to liberate? 

Victor Serge is, for me, one of the essential writers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. A rebel since adolescence, he watched the revolution he had become part of in Russia begin to devour itself through internal terror, while at the same time fighting against the White terror of its opponents.

This novel gives an insider view of St. Petersburg, once the Czarist capital of Russia under the Bolsheviks in 1919-1920. What is remarkable in all of Serge’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is that in spite of being nearly killed by the revolution he worked for, he never turned away from his ideals and belief that a new form of society was possible.

Like many of my generation of Americans I demonstrated against the Vietnam War which I saw unfolding at a distance through the newspapers and the television screen. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel has a remarkable sense of being inside the skin of his title character, a young Vietnamese sympathizer of the North Vietnamese as they attempt to free the South. This is a book of great complexity.

Through the eyes of the protagonist, a double agent working for the South Vietnamese, we see the fall of Saigon, the escape of those who have connections on the final flights out and, in the United States, the escaped officers and former South Vietnamese movers-and-shakers who now own hole-in-the-wall restaurants in San Jose and work in menial jobs while plotting the overthrow of the communist regime.  

But we also see the revolution hardening, the re-education camps, the human sympathy drained out of the victors. This isn’t a tract or a manifesto. It’s a novel, full of human sympathy, comedy, and terror.

The Years is a novel in the form of an autobiography but a novel stripped of the usual cohesion and sense that its protagonist’s life is all moving in a direction that will eventually cohere into some final meaning and that everything in its pages, its various settings, its observations, its smallest details, will all make a single story with its beginning, middle and end.  

But is anyone’s life like that? An epigraph from Ortega Y Gasset gives the clue to how this book unfolds and the atmosphere that moves through it: “All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.” The narrator, who distances herself from her autobiography by writing about herself in the third person, is born just after World War Two in a provincial town haunted by the war. 

She looks at photographs of herself at various stages of her life, she remembers what movies were playing, what she thought, what she read. She writes of the politics of France in the sixties and seventies. Her marriage and the gadgets that were so much a part of our lives that came and went as they were replaced by other gadgets.  

It’s all as if her life is, and isn’t hers, as if she’s come across the contents of the desk of a stranger with its odd bits of life, old photographs, theater tickets, newspaper clippings. The Years is at once intimate and distant, very real and very moving.