I commenced reading The Gulag Archipelago. Finally. It’s fairly ambitious of me to want to finish this 3 volume giant in record time. Despite a little bit of research that goes into every book that I pick up, this is far more brilliant than I’d have thought. Also, I have registered that I am showing a very strong inclination for books pertaining to wars, prisons and assorted crimes, these days. Vonnegutian fever returns? Perhaps. If I actually believed in psycho-analysis then I’d concur with those around me that it’s choices as mutant as these that lead to my infinite singledom.
Well, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is far better company than half the men I meet in this city, so no apparent harm.
The literary genius of certain writers sometimes acts an impediment for normal, non-lit grad bookends whilst actually reading them. More so in the case of a reclusive Russian, I reckon. Someone pointed out that the book is a study in “angry prose”. I have yet to draw conclusions. I confess that I am a compulsive book hoarder and possibly could go a step further to insert that much maligned self description – I am an avid reader. Biblophile or not though, sometimes, the serious emotional strain that a book can put on you is positively threatening and chimerical and hence exceedingly enticing. It’s almost a personal triumph to get through something like that. An honest account of a colossal, mass tragedy stirs something within you that can’t be countered easily by closing the chapters and putting the tome away. (James Frey, art thou listening?)
The KGB seized one of only three extant copies of the text still on Soviet soil – this was achieved by torturing a dissident Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, Solzhenitsyn’s typist who knew where the typed copy was hidden; within days after she was released by the KGB, she hung herself on 3 August 1973. (Linkage)
Meanwhile, cutting down on some of the acerbic commentary here, probably because when you are writing for human rights journals that chronicle disease, death and drugs you can’t afford the sardonic tone that usually colors everything that comes out of your being.
Tragedy, I tell you.
Also, this whole Sarah Palin brouhaha is endlessly frustrating and slap-worthy. Yet, the fun part of this exercise is that now I can backtrack it to Smile When You Are Lying which contains a rather wicked and succint observation of why Alaska has almost never managed to send a liberal to the Senate. By the eternally outrageous Chuck Thompson, of course.
Updated: Hereshe
