CHANGE IN STRUCTURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 658, 15 February 1952, Page 13

CHANGE IN STRUCTURE

THE WIND AND THE FLAME, by Manes" Sperber, translated by Constantine Fitz- | Gibbon; Wingate. New Zealand price, 15/-. MANES SPERBER’S The Wind and the Flame reminds one of the work of the pointillistes. Detail, like colour, is put on in small dots. The trouble is that one is forced to concentrate on the dots and never has a view of the canvas as a whole, Perhaps, in a way, that is_ symbolic of the work of the European Communists in the early stages of the Party’s development. They, too, were tied to details, being governed by the Party line, and were never able to, see the wider results of their work.. Neither were they able to see where they were being led. The book is more of a thesis seal a novel, a thesis on what one might call the change of structure in European Communism. But to the thesis is added, in the way that only a work in a fictional form could add it, the history of the way in which that change of structure affected the idealistic convinced Party members who carried their evangelical Communism through Europe in i early days. Perhaps the substance of The Wind and the Flame can best be summed up in the words of Doino, a Revolutionary Communist who worked sincerely for the Party all his life, only to find himself, in the end, completely cut off from it. "We'll hide the fraud with lies," he said in the beginning, "and then the lies will become truth and the fraud will be a fraud no longer. If only we remain true to the revolution the crooked will be made straight again." After his ostracism, when the men who worked with him are dead, and Communism as he believed it to be nothing’ more than a past dream, he says, "The fraud has ceased to be a (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) means to an end. It is an institution. The abuse of power is no longer a roundabout approach, since for a few people power itself has become the

only objective."

PIC