Reviews for Foundation Pit

The average rating for Foundation Pit based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-15 00:00:00 Hansel Q Alford We always believe that the bright future is just around the corner and we wait for it to come… …on the face of each young Pioneer girl there remained a trace of the difficulty, the feebleness of early life, meagerness of body and beauty of expression. But the happiness of childhood friendship, the realization of the future world in the play of youth and in the worthiness of their own severe freedom signified on the childish faces important gladness, replacing for them beauty and domestic plumpness. But the future seems not to be eager to arrive and we live in the distressing present and continue to wait… In the church burned many candles; the light of the silent, sad wax illuminated the entire interior of the building right up to the cupola above the hiding place of the sacred relics, and the cleanwashed faces of the saints stared out into the dead air with an expression of equanimity, like inhabitants of that other peaceful world'but the church was empty. And then everything seems to be left in the past… But everyone keeps waiting and growing old and then it is time to die… The Foundation Pit is an absolutely perspicacious allegory. Building of utopia always begins with an excavation of a pit but despite all the exertions and enthusiasm things never go any further…

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-15 00:00:00 Steve Vaught This might be the one book, fact or fiction, I'd recommend about life in the early days of the Soviet Union. A group of builders are digging out the foundations for a building. The symbolism is clear. What the building will be, is not ever made clear and may not even be important. The men are struggling, down in the foundations, with the implications of the new regime, which is under construction and which therefore has turned the way of life, the way of thinking and all relationships upside down. The future is deeply uncertain, the new world is under construction. That unknown, unvisualised future is not a source of hope or optimism but rather an ominous, looming presence over the novel. A stray young girl, a survivor from a bourgeois family, is taken-in and fed by the men. Because she, unlike the working men who reached adulthood under the old regime, is literate she becomes incredibly important as a mouthpiece for the new political values that dominate the press. An amazingly raw and bleak novel beautiful even in its own way. Highly recommended. Beware though reading it is like grating your own heart with a food grater. The most amazing thing is the language, just as Soviet foreign minister Molotov, while not drinking his cocktail, observed that peace is indivisible, change and struggle are also indivisible - everything is political so the choice of words, the use of language itself is deeply political and like Orwell's New Speak seeks to render certain ideas impossible and others inevitable. Of course it is all allegorical and I understand that certain people don't like allegory, but that's their loss.