Rip Van Winkle
The prisoner nicknamed Rip Van Winkle is an old revolutionary who has spent roughly two decades in confinement.
The book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe prisoner nicknamed Rip Van Winkle is an old revolutionary who has spent roughly two decades in confinement. Isolation has left him confused and psychologically damaged. He represents an earlier generation consumed so completely by the system that his original political identity has almost disappeared. His fate beyond the prison is not narrated.
If you like Darkness at Noon
If you like Arthur Koestler
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Sinclair Lewis
American novelist who satirised small-town conformity in Main Street and Babbitt, refused the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, and in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
View author
Mary Shelley
The author of Frankenstein, who first saw Paris at sixteen as a runaway. In the summer of 1814 she crossed from England to Calais with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, spent a week trapped in an expensive Paris hotel with no money, then bought a donkey and walked south-east across a France still wrecked by the Napoleonic wars. That journey became her first published book. Two years later, on a lake in Switzerland, she began her second.
View author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian novelist who came to Paris twice in the 1860s, hated it with unusual precision, and wrote the result up as Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, a short, savage account of the French bourgeoisie that stands as the sharpest case ever made against the city by a writer passing through it.
View author