Essential chronicles of the worst face of the totalitarian state.
Building on his Kolyma Stories (2018), one-time prisoner Shalamov limns the hell that was the Soviet gulag.
The stories gathered here, apparently reportage with a light veneer of fiction to disguise names, open with their author chiding himself for being “thrilled by the ‘heroic’ figures of the criminal world,” adulation befitting an impressionable teenager. For, as Shalamov (1907-1982) writes, there really were criminals in the gulag, not just blameless victims of Stalin. At the head of the hierarchy were the “hereditary thieves,” those who knew no other way than robbery—and who were not to be confused with the amateurs who swelled the ranks of the criminal class following the “dekulakization” of the 1930s. The professionals wield tremendous power: In one of Shalamov’s tales, they threaten the head medical officer at a mine where one of their “godfathers” had been sent with unspecified violence while promising him two suits of clothing if he arranges for a transfer to “a thieves’ place, the Northern Administration.” Indeed, apart from the criminals, many of the figures whom Shalamov profiles are the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who serve the camps, often as inmates themselves; the prisoners tend to make little distinction over titles, so long as they can get a little medicine and perhaps a little time off in the clinic, and even the captors who administer the prison system prefer those doctors to the ones on the outside. There are fascinating sociological side notes, such as the odd fact that the “murderers or thieves” among the gulag’s denizens were fond of the poetry of Sergei Yesenin, “the only poet who was accepted and consecrated by the criminals, who generally altogether disliked poetry.” As in his earlier volume, Shalamov writes matter-of-factly, unblinkingly, about the endless horrors of the gulag, which are scarcely comprehensible.
Essential chronicles of the worst face of the totalitarian state.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-367-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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