The War of the Poor

"Well, this book just roars into action. From the first moment, you’re being swept away by the energy with which Vuillard writes. And his translator keeps up with him every step of the way. It’s about Thomas Müntzer, who’s a little-remembered hero of the European religious reformation in the 16th century. He was a furious campaigner against the powers of church and state in a period when the church was a secular, as well as a sacred, power. He was the leader of a peasant uprising, one of the many that convulsed Europe at the time. The book is a polemic. It’s a sermon. It’s a kind of a cry of anguish about social injustice. It’s also a lyrically beautiful evocation of an era when for everyone, kings and peasants alike, life was charged with the ecstatic, terrifying sense that heaven and hell were close at hand. Münzter was a great orator, a great rabble rouser. Vuillard conjures all his persuasive brilliance, but also his selfless and self-destructive rage. This is a kind of fictionalised biography, charged with electrical imaginative power. It’s thrillingly energetic and vivid. But it’s also a work of historical reconstruction. It speaks very loudly and with terrifying clarity about the inequalities of not just the society in which Müntzer lived, but the society in which we live now. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s an easy book to read, in one sense; it’s written in rapid, idiomatic prose. We are carried off by its blazing energy into a world of violence and sacrifice, mud and blood, and rapturous religious visions. But it’s also a book that really gets inside your mind and gets you thinking. A small book that packs a tremendous punch. There’s not much good to be said of living through an international pandemic, but for us having no distractions was helpful. If you can’t go out, settling down on a sofa with a masterpiece which could be from anywhere around the world is going to open your mind to places you can’t or haven’t visited. So it’s been a privilege, the most thrilling winter. Without getting out, I’ve had so many adventures. Part of our best books of 2021 series."