THE BURNED BRAMBLE (405 pp.)Manes SperberDoubleday ($3.95).
If the run of ex-Communist novelists can be believed, the only good Communists are dead Communists, and the man who destroyed them is Stalin. Most of them died because they failed to make the tricky turns on the tortuous slalom course of the party line. Some of them didn't even see the turns coming up. A few saw them but preferred destruction to further writhing and twisting.
The Burned Bramble belongs in the select company of those novels which have best explained why and how the good Communists become dead ones (others : Arthur Koestler's Darkness...
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