BookWyrm

Paperback, 448 pages

English language

Published July 7, 2011 by Faber & Faber.

ISBN:: 9780571225248

(1 review)

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Red Plenty is history, it's …

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

3 editions

Shauna reviewed Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

A well-written, experimental novel for the economically inclined

5 stars

This book had me at its premise: "a novel about the socialist calculation debate". If you are not interested in economic theory, you should skip it - the question of how best to run an economy is not just the main driver of the story and a topic of conversation among characters, there are several significant chunks of the book that are just straight-out lecture. I found the lecture-y bits to be very helpful context, so I will not dock stars for them, though I preferred the actual story (which is maybe 85-90% of the text).

The book follows many characters, real and some fictional, some we keep circling back to and some we never see again. Luckily Spufford has a knack for sketching interesting characters quickly. Still, this is not the kind of book that grips you hard and fast so you can't put it down. You can read …

This book had me at its premise: "a novel about the socialist calculation debate". If you are not interested in economic theory, you should skip it - the question of how best to run an economy is not just the main driver of the story and a topic of conversation among characters, there are several significant chunks of the book that are just straight-out lecture. I found the lecture-y bits to be very helpful context, so I will not dock stars for them, though I preferred the actual story (which is maybe 85-90% of the text).

The book follows many characters, real and some fictional, some we keep circling back to and some we never see again. Luckily Spufford has a knack for sketching interesting characters quickly. Still, this is not the kind of book that grips you hard and fast so you can't put it down. You can read it in pieces here and there. That's fine - it succeeds in what it wants to be, not a thriller or an epic but a thoughtful exploration of an important question through the lens of storytelling.