The Implacable Years

The itinerary of undesirable characters in a Europe heading straight for disaster, this posthumous novel recalls the last days of pre-war Paris and the siege of Leningrad via the fall of Berlin, before ending in the Mexican sierra. In the face of implacable terror, the protagonists try and save their love-life by attempting “to escape from a world where escape was totally impossible…” Victor Serge, born in 1890 into a family of anti-Tsarist exiles, went back to Russia once the revolution was announced. As a member of the Left opposition, he went to prison, was then sent away to the Urals, and was finally expelled from the USSR after years of pleas and intercession from militants and other writers. He returned to France in time to see its disastrous collapse, then went on to Mexico, where he died in 1947.