Marx Returns - by Jason Barker (Paperback)

About the Book

The story of one man's struggle to write the book that will change the world.

Book Synopsis

Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers' revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx's revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.

Review Quotes

An imaginative, uplifting, and sometimes disturbing alternative history.--Nina Power, Roehampton University "Los Angeles Review of Books"

An outstanding work of fiction that goes to the very heart of Marx's revolutionary thinking.--Slavoj Zizek, Author of Disparities and Sex and the Failed Absolute

Barker's book crosses the same terrain as Raoul Peck's film The Young Karl Marx, drawing together biography, narrative, and ideas, but it does so in a way that actively embraces fiction... Barker fills his novel with the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century London in the midst of the industrial revolution; reminding us that if "the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present", then some of that history is also a forgetting, as the brutality of exploitation has been sanitized and moved out of sight.--Jason Read "Unemployed Negativity"

Curious, funny, perplexing, and irreverent, an inspired divagation that casts unexpected light on Marx's thought.--Ray Brassier, American University of Beirut

For years we've been led to believe that "Marx was right". On the evidence of Jason Barker's debut novel, however, it seems we may have grossly underestimated him. Joyful, artful and playfully anachronistic, Marx Returns is a book you're unlikely to want to end.--Yong Soon Seo, Professor of Philosophy, Sungkyunkwan University

If you're inclined to doubt the dramatic potential of differential calculus then take my advice and read this marvellous novel.--Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life

The coming and going with history, with all the paths of these revolutionaries more or less lost, stranded in London; the references to new conceptual frameworks proposed by the sciences; a Jenny Marx who has so much in common with Joyce's Molly... In short, the chaosmos of Jason Barker's Marx and his struggles interests me in so many respects.--Pascal Bataillard, French translator, James Joyce's Ulysses

About the Author

Jason Barker is the writer, director and co-producer of the 2011 documentary Marx Reloaded. He is Professor of English at Kyung Hee University, South Korea and visiting professor of Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School.