Uncertain, Fugitive, Half-fabulous

I had two different professors, of two different disciplines, recommend this book to me, then I saw the cover and had to have it. It wasn't long before my girlfriend got it for me for Hanukkah, but it was almost a year before I was able to read it myself.

In short, Red Cavalry is amazing, but I could see it being disappointing for those who go in with the wrong expectations. Babel's style here is, I think, a natural progression from Tolstoy's--that is, he's even less caught up with writing something that fits "western" ideas of how a story should be told (Tolstoy was always quick to define the Russian author as something far removed from the "western" one, and Babel allowed himself to die because he couldn't let himself be anything other than a Russian author), there's no real plot and little direct character development, which usually bothers me but good. But Babel does it right, and his characters are sometimes frightening and endearing because of their lack of development. Besides he isn't really writing about characters most of the time, not really.

Now that all sounds extremely pretentious, and it is. So let me be a little less full of myself: these stories are by turns funny and horrifying and ironic and touching and dark, and they are always amazingly written on a sentence level. Babel went over his sentences many, many times, and it shows. What's more, anyone who's ever been a bookish little nerd caught up, all at once, in fearing, disdaining, and respecting men of action will understand Babel's point of view.

Babel was writing, technically, for a propaganda newspaper, and it is clear that, at some point, he really believed in the Revolution, so what he writes here is not ANTI-Communist, but neither is it pro. The soldiers in Red Cavalry, whose job it is to spread Communism to the world, have no real grasp of the concept, but they know who they don't like--and that they are the vanguard of Russia's great expansion is all the more frightening because of it. Lyutov, Babel's avatar, does not generally watch them with judgment or condemnation, he simply explains all of the atrocities to us, in stark and beautiful prose, sometimes impersonal and sometimes much too personal, and himself tries not to be killed (for being a weakling, or a Jew, or a whatever else).

If my thoughts are a bit scattershot right now it's because I loved this book so much, and yet it is so dense, so disturbing, and so intense that I have trouble hanging onto why. I often read pages three or four times, which is not normal for me. I also skipped the story fragments and diary entries that were tacked onto this edition, meaning I only read about 200 pages, and yet I will definitely have to re-read Red Cavalry relatively soon. It washed over me, assaulted me, and it even delighted me (although then I felt real damn guilty for it), and when I was done I wasn't entirely sure what I'd read. But I knew it was one of the best things I'd ever come across.