I read The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume I by Peter Weiss

I know, I know, I recommend too many enormous tomes I think will change your life (see also: The Man Without Qualities, Ada, Against the Day…) But the first volume (just over 300 pages) of this 1000-page novel from the perspective of a young anti-fascist between World War I and the outbreak of World War II really worked for me despite its boggling density– a paragraph break is about as rare as a conversation that doesn’t unwind into a many pages long dialectical and historical explication.

Little happens in the way of plot movement: the protagonist and two friends view and discuss the Pergamon Altar in the National Gallery of Berlin, and then decamp to one of their parents’ flats for a further discussion of realist versus avant garde art, the protagonist has weird dreams about his parents during his last night in Berlin before traveling to Spain to join the resistance, expecting to be sent to the front lines he instead is assigned to assist and witness the discussions of recovering injured soldiers in a reclusive hospital run by a sexologist and psychoanalyst who is on thin ice with the party. When his post is dissolved he meets up again with one of the friends from the beginning, and they look at a print of Picasso’s Guernica in a magazine.

This summary really doesn’t spoil anything because the constant dialectical discussions, and the protagonist trying to take in all of these different views is the meat here. Constant themes include art and aesthetics, party politics, the role of sexuality, effective resistance in crisis, and, most movingly, how to lead an aesthetic and philosophical life when you’re so tired from working all the time, trying to make legible to you a tradition that only was accessible to and expressive of the elite for hundreds of years, and trying to assert yourself as having a share of it, even when people think it’s not for people like you in the first place.

That the characters are so invested in this point, and that they’re always having the sort of discussions I feel like myself and my friends and partner have when we look at the world today made this book really special to me. There’s a bit where, amidst the chaos and fear of the rise of fascism, the main character receives a letter from his friend which includes a long-promised psychoanalytic-slash-marxist analysis of the myth of Hercules, just because it continued a thread from the last time they were together. That’s what life’s all about, man…