Book Forty-Six of the Book-a-Week Quest
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
I'm going to spoil the ending of the book for you by typing up the the last paragraphs:
Shukov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at the search point. He'd earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he'd bought his tobacco.
The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.
Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
The extra three were for leap years.
Those paragraphs sum up the book. It's simply a day in the life of a guy named Ivan Denisovich Shukov who is a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s. You'd think that might lead to boredom...and, in part, you'd be right. Nothing of any significance happens in this book. Yet the author manages to make Shukov's utterly mundane life seem interesting. There's no chapters or page breaks throughout the book, so you're simply reading straight through about a day in the life of a Soviet prisoner.
There's really not a whole lot to say here except to say that as I was looking through a bookshelf and spotted this, I couldn't believe that I was actually going to read it. I mean, this was Russian, had no chapters, and, if I'm being honest, the summary on the back of the book didn't sound too appealing. For some reason, though, I started it and found it surprisingly interesting.
I'll consider this as prep for my 2010 goal of reading War and Peace.
If you finish War and Peace next year, I will too.
ReplyDeleteI have a 900+ page lead on you, but still.
http://tinyurl.com/kng7cr
ReplyDeleteThought you would be interested in this.
I made an Ivan Denisovich doll out of my Shave-and-Fun Ken Doll. complete with utensil in boot.
ReplyDeleteActually. It was my sister's Shave-and-Fun Ken Doll.
ReplyDeleteMeghan - Ha!
ReplyDeleteJustin - I've read a few of those books this year...I wish the article described what their definition of post-modernism is.
According to wikipedia, postmodernism refers to "a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality." So, how does The Scarlett Letter fit on that list? I think there's a pretty damn clear organizing principle there.
I mean, there's a huge difference in tone and substance between "The Scarlett Letter" and "The Mezzanine," for example.