One of the most significant works of postwar German literature. . . . Exhilaratingly strange, compelling, and original. Readers who dare to enter this demanding verbal landscape will not come away empty-handed. - Mark M. Anderson Bookforum
The Aesthetics of Resistance, which [ Peter Weiss] began when he was well over fifty, making a pilgrimage over the arid slopes of cultural and contemporary history in the company of pavor nocturnus, the terror of the night, and laden with a monstrous weight of ideological ballast, is a magnum opus which sees itself . . . not only as the expression of an ephemeral wish for redemption, but as an expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time. - W. G. Sebald
"It is worth noting off the bat just how good these translations are. Each volume consists of roughly thirty-three-the formal echo of Dante is deliberate-prose blocks of an average of around ten pages each. Within these blocks, sentences regularly cover half a page or more, and syntax is twisted to a point that makes even a language as notoriously malleable as German come close to collapse. To have rendered this into a precise, complex, and still-readable English is a massive achievement." - Tom Allen e-flux
"There are dozens, if not hundreds, of novels about World War Two. . . . Having not read them all, I do not dare to rank these works. However, after finishing up the third volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance, I am secure in writing that it is certainly one of the best." - Ron Jacobs Counterpunch
"Weiss pushes the boundaries of the novel in bold and revolutionary-in all senses of the word-directions. In the end, the walls separating the novel from history, philosophy, and aesthetics are demolished. . . . There are historians who have not been kind to resistance groups, asserting that their effectiveness was more symbolic than real. Weiss will have none of that. . . . The Aesthetics of Resistance is a monument to their lives and sacrifices, to the possibilities of art and its role in resisting evil." - Mitchell Abidor Los Angeles Review of Books
"Weiss forces you to ask how the crisis youre reading about could have been prevented, how it could still be transformed, and what it means for you right now. . . . Scotts extensive work on this translation pays off powerfully, making the books challenges as readable as they can be in English without sacrificing key conclusion-suspending moments Weisss German kept unbearably taut in their incommensurate completeness. . . . Its almost like Weiss wanted to prepare us, our ability to listen, to imagine, to stay rooted and stable, to trust, to be able enough to take collective action in the midst of a calamity. The book is a challenge, its training, but its not impossible. Neither is this moment." - Kay Gabriel and Patrick DeDauw Bookforum
"All three volumes of The Aesthetics of Resistance raise questions about how to resist in unholy times and the reader is drawn into the debate. What happened in Spain and Germany in the 1930s has its own history but what is now taking place around the world cannot help but evoke the calamities and upheavals of those times. . . . The author, Peter Weiss, never gave up the struggle and nor should his readers." - Sean Sheehan The Prisma
