Darkness at Noon

Name: Darkness at Noon
Author: Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler · 1940

How a true believer in the revolution is brought to confess to crimes he did not commit. Koestler's 1940 novel about Stalinist show trials stages a great philosophical confrontation: the logic of the party versus the last gasp of individual conscience. Rubashov's interrogation scenes rank among the finest dialogue in 20th-century fiction. Modern Library placed it eighth.

The case against

on the pace
“as a novel it is almost motionless”
Kirkus Reviews, 1941
on the third chapter
“the narrative starts to come apart in the third chapter”
a book blog
on the translation
“Darkness at Noon sounds awfully wooden in its present English form”
Michael Scammell · The New York Review of Books, 2016
on the politics
“Marxism today seems distant and quaint”
a book blog