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| what is this even a picture of |
Reading this book is like listening to a favorite song with high-quality headphones after only ever hearing it through a sub-par car stereo in a beater from the 90s. The song is already familiar, maybe even a bit tired, but the headphones reveal new things about it. Maybe I've read a zillion books about various work and concentration camps, but not any with this level of straightforward depth.
Summarizing this book is very easy. Ivan Denisovish wakes up, eats, marches, builds a wall, eats, marches again, waits, gets frisked, stands in some lines, eats again, smokes, gets counted (a few times), and then goes to sleep. Together we agree, it was a great day. If I had bothered to keep track, which now I wish I had, I could tell you exactly how many grams of bread Ivan ate throughout the day, and when.
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| how many grams does that loaf weigh? Ivan would know |
Sometimes I forget what I ate for breakfast by the end of the day. For example, I know I ate 10% MF yoghurt with strawberries yesterday because it was especially delicious but what did I have the day before? I can never be sure. Not so Ivan Denisovich. How thick was his soup? How many grams of bread has he eaten? What kind of grain is this? Ivan knows, and Ivan can tell you. Ivan can tell you about tobacco, mittens, foot wraps, stoves, and cold, and Ivan can tell you in excellent detail. This book might make you feel cold, and while doing so will drop gems like "a man who is warm cannot understand a man who is freezing" which, let's be honest, is an amazing thing to say, especially in a book that is trying to make the reader understand, a little better, a freezing man's life.
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| Canadian winter garb. |
"Solzhenitsyn"? Omgosh my last name is boring. I started reading Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy right after finishing this book so maybe it's all related. Solzhenitsyn broke the Russian ice for me or something (causation? correlation? what?). I've tried to get through Crime and Punishment, but I think I was way too young to actually absorb and "get" it, and I gave up in desperation. BUT NOW: I know I can read and finish reading a book written by a Russian EVEN THOUGH One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovish is very, very short. I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain, I have confidence that one day I will finally finish reading both The Idiot and Crime & Punishment but not until after I've read Resurrection which, thank goodness, has three-page chapters that make me feel like I am accomplishing something.
I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell is going on with that cover. Is it a face being squished by a giant hand? Cos I think that's what I'm landing on.
ReplyDeleteAlso I have never read the Russians. I don't think any of them. Not sure how I managed that, but they intimidate me.
I definitely spent a large portion of the time I was ostensibly reading this book staring at the cover instead of reading, trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Conclusion: there's definitely a hand, definitely a face, not sure what else.
DeleteYou should read this one! It's like, 200 pages! I too am very intimidated by the Russians, especially with the insane multiple names per person thing, but this book is multiname-lite.