Welcome to Insurgent Summer. I’m excited to be reading Letters of Insurgents again, and I’m equally excited to be sharing the experience because – as I always say – I think that it’s the best novel ever written. That’s a bold statement, and I’m willing to stand behind it.

I was introduced to the book when my friend Aragorn! brought in two chapters to share at an anarchist reading group. Aragorn! described his relationship with the book with the following sentence:

“When you read this, you will understand me better.”

After reading those two chapters, I decided to read the entire book. I was blown away throughout my adventure with the novel and decided when finishing it that I agreed with Aragorn!’s description.

Not long after that, I was discussing the book with a comrade during a break between bands at a punk show. I said that it was my favorite novel. He was similarly enamored with it, and he haven’t even finished it yet. I told him that the ending was so good that I was almost jealous that he was about to get to that part. He proposed a completely ridiculous idea to me: to audio record the entire book – him as Yarostan and me as Sophia – and make it available to download for free. We had exactly three months to complete this gargantuan task before he left on an indefinite adventure, so we started meeting every Wednesday night, first having dinner and then each recording ourselves reading aloud, all night, until the small hours of the morning. He would edit his previous week’s recording while I read my part aloud, and then we would switch tasks. This process was extremely time-consuming, but we didn’t miss a week for fear that we wouldn’t finish before his flight out of town. I’m guessing that we spent at least 50 hours each on this project that resulted in 33 hours of finished audio recording.

It also resulted in something else entirely. In the course of spending time together working on a shared passion, my comrade and I fell in love. Madly, as it were. This began to change the recording process in a qualitative way. Passionate letters between two fictional characters in a book were infused with the affection growing between the two people reading them aloud. They became love letters between him and me. When Sophia utters words of love, make no mistake that it’s me making a heartfelt statement to the person who was at the time sitting on my bed a few feet away from me deleting his coughs and stammers from the previous week’s work. If anyone has any doubt as to the humanity behind the voices, I recommend listening to the Delirium Track in the audiobook version to hear our outtakes.

We became a two-person study group, each of us becoming especially involved in our own half of the novel. It entered our sex life: we were teenagers caught on the factory room floor whatever pleases you, Yarostan, and we were brother and sister in the woods what could be more natural. I painted a wall yellow for the mural of the book cover image that I didn’t stay long enough in the house to complete. And when we started really arguing, passages of the book entered even then: the old woman with her broom, and Yarostan thinks it’s raining!

Ultimately the audio version lives on, and there have been times that I have found it hard to consider doing any other recordings because I think of my own voice as Sophia’s. I once met someone at an infoshop in another city, and at some point the topic of the audiobook came up. He asked me if I had listened to it.

“Um, yes,” I said, “I’m Sophia.”

This is noteworthy because audio recording notwithstanding, Sophia is the character I most identify with in the book. For a while I was despondent about this, because there are several flaws to Sophia’s personality. I’m such a Sophia! I would say to myself occasionally, if I was exhibiting signs of fear or self-doubt. When I discovered that Fredy Perlman himself identified most closely with Sophia, however, I became less self-conscious. I now believe that Sophia is a great character despite her flaws, and I no longer feel bad when I’m like her.

Reading Letters of Insurgents struck me with the idea to write a novel myself. This time around, I intend to focus somewhat on Perlman’s crafting of the novel. There is a mystery in the story which begins on the very first page and follows throughout the entire book. It is a multi-faceted mystery with a few angles, but the hint in the second paragraph about a missing letter with alleged “strange power” opens a box of mysteries spanning decades and concluding only at the end of Yarostan’s last letter. Part of what I found so riveting about this novel was the endurance of Perlman’s slow unraveling of the mystery. An epistolary novel – one written in the form of letters – allows a sense of real time to pass between the characters’ interactions, time enough for Sophia and Yarostan to reflect upon each other’s words and time for plot movement in each of their separate lives.

Realistic political discussions enmeshed within the plot add to the story’s appeal to me. There are always a few conversations going on between Sophia and Yarostan at any one time: their shared and separate pasts, current events in their lives, and their discussions at home with the other’s previous letter. Sophia’s first letter is comprised mostly of the story and arguments surrounding a group reading of Yarostan’s first letter. Sophia brings up topics such as the institution of the family and the role of workplace organizing, and these sorts of relevant political discussions continue throughout the book in the way that they continue throughout the span of an interesting life.