The Invisible Writing
The second volume of Koestler's autobiography, covering his years in the Communist Party and his break with it.
The second volume of Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, covering 1932 to 1940, the years he spent as a Communist Party agent travelling through the Soviet Union and Central Asia, working underground in Europe, and reporting on the Spanish Civil War, where he was captured by Franco’s forces and held for months under sentence of death. It is the record of a slow disillusionment: Koestler describes what he saw of the Ukrainian famine and the purges, and traces the internal reasoning by which he, and others like him, kept explaining it away. He gives the book its title from the invisible writing he felt he was reading in the condemned cell, a private mysticism he refuses either to disown or to systematise.
Recommended by 1 Person
John Gray
He responds to a view by [the critic] Raymond Mortimer that Koestler’s writings assume events to be normal which Mortimer considers abnormal. This drew from Koestler an angry and well justified reply at the end of this volume of memoirs that his life, on which he based his writing and thinking, was completely normal for people in most of Europe at that time. It was normal to fear the loss of one’s life savings.
Interview · March 2012
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