In the Guardian of last saturday I read an edited excerpt from Frances Wheen’s forthcoming book on Marx’ Das Kapital (in a series that is called ‘Books that Shook the World’). It’s also online: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html.

“By the time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose into radical literary collage – juxtaposing voices and quotations from mythology and literature, from factory inspectors’ reports and fairy tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land.”

Not only did it inspire me to go out and try to buy the book immediately (but it’s not available yet…), it paints such a alluring picture of the book and the style it is written in, that I’m tempted to make Marx’ big book my summer reading…

But then, should I read it in German (all the editions look equally ugly), or pick up the Penguin Classics edition that probably most people are reading nowadays and that, I guess, Wheen cites from…

(Frances Wheen also wrote a very enjoyable biography of Marx.)