Ir is chis explosion of tradition. to espress a new and all-embracing materialist content, which makes Ehremberg's "novel one of the most important literary products ol any post tonou ary society. Af the sume time it manages io be both fiction and nun-fiction, nowel and doc omentury, Cantasy and reality.
STYLE Yet its greatoess ls diminished, bot ly anything within il, but cbc knowiedge that Ehrenberg rapidiy becamne acholder of the batren icocis ol "socialist realisin*, Its publication in the Soviet Union in 1929, must 011 Lne fourishes of a genuinely free post-revolutionary culture.
Thia was soon annihilated by a vulgar Stalinist artistic dogma. From then on, Soviet artists were bocupelled co adopt even Stalin's bankrupt suie of ariting und expression, to remain alive Nevertheless Automobile must still be assessed in its own term u Depan the historical materialisr premise that the fassgrowing capitalist car TAULST nted aha expansive.
and totally destructive of all the social relations into which ir penetrated. The book ws a atack on the cruel, At one point in Life of the Automobile, Ilya Ehrenberg states: "This is not a novel. This is a stock-market bulletin the conventionul categories of bourgeois literature.
Trireric conaldOs UiG HHI! car industry. But it is much more than that.
Phrenberg asked himseif the question: How and through wha oratan apes tacet n LOCaLiY In forms te hand were too limited, too paroe al spetel with the So he dispensea such as a centra POTROACI COnEIECI and "ploc' in the accepted sense What me are left with leaux, high-lighting in scunning and often poetic detail the worl "VILLAIN' Bur the whole is held rogether tee an esthe ol ly teai vilan 1 - the only real "villain" the motor CAT. writer, was the stark embodiment of tweatieth century capitalism. РоДіс пас Шве, Dur0су н -Marxs concept of 'allesation ediately dominated hy them come to full traition mn new ane manager of therubber planiation inter- MT NANVA GONCU EE UC CHEI mane that his wife and all his. property is er:" The rubber. u MM malaIe3H0J motor-car chronologi- eversone's life. Citroen, locked in bacile wils t We see, 100.
is a series shifring tab- EACUEDTEWES frst victim of an auto aessdent bice Eve will tae tom berless workers on the gribding assembly car by invisible, economic cords.
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hraker. crashi the halealch carving up the world market; the This lor The centiry inventor; the bloodied piantation-slave mongnare. And all tied together hy a real modif glinering, murdering automob скатріє. CRITICISM evil- L unule te u as TINteIuI various ama excludes the mass resistance to the barbarity of the unfetiered swamp and invade gamhler, We witness the Jestraction by his own Yes, tied to that same Targocien destroved by che samie Churchill. ng once again tha engineer; the nineteenti writing. and the gleamin only starting poin innary ar Hope could lave any critscism Plato at 12.70.
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and this is a political history". Certainly the ambitious scope of this unique piece of revolutionary writing defies