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    A Small Revolution in Germany
    Unavailable
    A Small Revolution in Germany
    Unavailable
    A Small Revolution in Germany
    Audiobook10 hours

    A Small Revolution in Germany

    Written by Philip Hensher

    Narrated by Neville Watchurst

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    A Small Revolution in Germany is about growing up, or refusing to accept what growing up means; it’s about the small dishonest pacts that people make with their own futures; and it’s about the rare and joyous refusal to be disillusioned.

    Everyone remembers what it’s like to be seventeen. The conversations you have; the ideas that burst on you; the kiss that transforms you. And then you grow up, and make a deal with adulthood. A Small Revolution in Germany is about that rapturous moment when ideas, and ideals, and passion crash over one boy’s head. And what happens in the decades afterwards? When you see the overwhelming truth when you are seventeen, why should you ever abandon that truth?
     
    Spike is brought into a small, clever group of friends, bursting with a passion for ideas, and the wish to change the world. They smash up political meetings; they paint slogans on walls; they long for armed revolution; they argue, exuberantly, until dawn. In the years to follow, they all change their minds, and go into the world. They become writers, politicians, public figures. One of them becomes famous when she dies. They all change their minds, and make sensible compromises. Only Spike stays exactly as he is, going on with the burning desire for change, in the safe embrace of unconditional love. Alone from the old group, he is the only one who has achieved nothing, and who has never deviated from the impractical shining path of revolution he saw as a teenager. Thirty years on, photographs of the teenage group look like a bunch of celebrated individuals, with only one unknown face in it – Spike.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateFeb 6, 2020
    ISBN9780008323097
    Unavailable
    A Small Revolution in Germany
    Author

    Philip Hensher

    Philip Hensher has written eleven novels, including The Mulberry Empire, the Booker shortlisted The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, Scenes from Early Life, which won the Ondaatje Prize in 2012, The Friendly Ones and A Small Revolution in Germany. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Bath Spa and lives in south London and Geneva.

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    • 5/5
      My third read by Philup Hensher, and it's superb. Narrator Spike recalls his politically charged teenage years. With a band of highly intelligent if, at times gauche and naive, socialist chums, life revolves around taking on the establishment...with much teenage bravado and self promotion. As they mix with a slightly older set, Spike meets his lifelong love, Chilean Joaquin..Life moves on; the characters go off to university, forge careera, move away from the teen idealism. Re-inventing themselves, hushing up past activities, working the system...Spike and Ogden - once the leader (?) of the teenagers, now a political aide, take a holiday in the DDR....And in the final section, Spike and Joaquin- the only ones who kept their youthful ideals, now nearly sixty, take a hiking holiday in Germany and tie up ends of their erstwhile clique.I couldnt put it down. The evocation of life as an idealistic teen; the exploration of how we change to fit into society (or not)."Ogden had not learnt the same lesson I had learnt. For him, still, politics consisted of what politicians choose to do to the people. Their agreement must be extracted, or the appearance of an agreement. Then the politician is free to do what he wants to them. For me political life is a matter of objecting from the floor, of making the individual voice heard."