September 7, 2009
Few novels confront human suffering on as massive a scale as this one. After his release into post-Stalinist Russia, Ivan Grigoryevich finds that the 30 years he spent in Stalin's forced labor camps have wreaked terrible changes in himself and in Soviet society. He goes first to his cousin's Moscow apartment, but he and his wife are preoccupied with petty successes secured by cooperation with a state-sanctioned campaign of anti-Semitism. Ivan then travels to Leningrad, where he finds work in a metal shop and rents a room from a widow who falls in love with him and shares stories from her past (most notably the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farms), providing a counterbalance to Ivan's experiences in Siberia. Suffering is everywhere, but Grossman finds no glory or redemption in it, and just when you think things can't get bleaker, he offers up a new vignette that sinks deeper into misery, though there is a glimmer of hope toward the end. The prose is rough in spots, but Grossman's individual by individual portrayal of anguish gives readers a heartrending glimpse of the incomprehensible.
November 1, 2009
Grossman's brilliant and courageous novel, written between 1955 and 1963, is unexpectedly empathetic toward perpetrators of varying degrees of, and silent accomplices to, the atrocities committed against large segments of the Soviet population (especially kulaks and Jews) during the Stalin years. Grossman ("Life and Fate") tells the story of one man's attempt to reintegrate himself into society following several decades in the gulag. The novel is ultimately an homage to Russian women, whom the narrator claims suffer much more than men in Russian society. After he becomes intimate with his landlady, the narrator finds solace in her honest rendering of how she survived her own trials. A small play, in which the narrator's cousin attempts to justify before a judge signing a petition against colleagues, is jarringly dropped into the narrative, and a good portion of the second half reads more like a political treatise, condemning Lenin and, to a lesser extent, Stalin. VERDICT For anyone interested in the time portrayed, this is a rewarding novel despite some drawbacks. Just as we find slim optimism as Beckett's characters continue to exist in spite of everything, readers will find hope in the narrator's uncommon capacity to forgive and accept.Kurt H. Cumiskey, Duke Univ. Libs., Durham, NC
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