Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly one of the greats. His writing is profound and poetic, but also has notes of attitude and cheek that make it down-to-earth and relatable. This book kept me completely drawn in and quickly became one of my favorites. Solzhenitsyn writes characters in such an intimate way that you find yourself deeply connected to them. The development of those characters and the deep questions they bring to light,...
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Those were the words that Dorothy used to describe Oz after waking up in the bosom of her family. The same intense feeling came over me while reading this book, a task that spanned several years, as I often put it aside for other things, always returning, drawn by the power of the author's prose in opening his world to us. The realness of Solzhenitsyn's worlds makes him perhaps the most accessible Russian novelist. As he described...
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Reading Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward" without the historical background of the country in which it is set, a casual reader would be shocked to learn this book was banned by the Soviet government for many years. This book would seem to be nothing more than a sad story of life in a poor country's ward for terminally ill cancer patients. But through the interaction and description of the doctors and patients in Solzhenitsyn's...
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"All I want is... to sleep on a camp-bed under the stars... to live just this one summer..." That is the simple sentiment of the patients of the Cancer Ward... expressed by one, but felt by all. Through a study of the diverse lives of the characters here assembled, Solzhenitsyn probes with searing exactitude the process of living with cancer, and more specifically, the TREATMENT of cancer in Stalinist Russia. He had reason...
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Cancer Ward is often overshadowed by its predecessor, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and its successor, the immense memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. While the worldly impact of those two works is perhaps greater, the aesthetic power of Cancer Ward is stronger than both of those works. The story is poignant and powerful, reaching out and probing deeply into the essential questions that are never answered by not only...
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