A dystopian book: Soft Goulag by Yves Velan
Posted: Sunday, April 3, 2011 by Janek in Labels: books, distopia, readingsA dystopian story, resembling our mass-consumption society
Soft Goulag by Yves Velan is a book about a dystopian world. Neoliberalism reaches its golden (worst) age and we can follow a man living under its rules, made dumb by stupid TV shows.
Citizens are prisoners of neoliberalism. They are conditioned and normalized under ‘soft’ dictatorship. But it’s an accepted and hidden one because they are not in fact oppressed. They live in comfort and their desires are canalized by mass consuming.
In other words, they live in a maze but as there is no visible Minotaur so they don’t try to escape. It’s a metaphor about our society, encouraging us to wake up, act and achieve our dreams.
An original reading experience
It’s hard to read this book because the writing style is annoying. Style reflects the narrator’s mind structure (a person conditioned by that society), a style smoothed by TV ways of talking and treating information.
But I think it’s a good reading experience because it shakes our reading habits and has us face a world without literature.
A rare book
Last month, a friend offered me this book and I was very impatient to read it. Why ? Because I had been desperately looking for it for 3 years! It was impossible to find. I discovered its existence on the web, typing ‘dystopia’ in Wikipedia. I wanted to read it but it was no longer published. For me, it turned into a myth.
You can now perhaps find it if you write to its editors in Switzerland.
