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.
Aldous Huxley
English novelist of Brave New World, which he wrote not in Paris but on the Mediterranean coast at Sanary-sur-Mer. His French years ran from a rented house at Suresnes on the western edge of Paris, where he pushed the dying D. H. Lawrence towards the city's presses, to seven years on the Riviera; he then left for California, wrote the best-known modern account of taking mescaline, the hallucinogenic drug made from the peyote cactus, and died on the day President Kennedy was shot.
View author
George Orwell
English novelist, essayist and journalist, born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was an imperial policeman in Burma, a plongeur in Paris kitchens off the rue Mouffetard, and a militiaman shot through the neck in Spain before any of it.
View author
Franz Kafka
Prague novelist who worked fourteen years as an accident-insurance official, left three novels unfinished, told his friend Max Brod to burn everything, and was disobeyed. His Paris is a holiday, not an exile: he came twice as a tourist with Brod between 1909 and 1912, and never lived there.
View author