Orion Reads
a diary of books etc.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

trundling

Finished A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, it was good. It was much less heavy-handed than i expected, which is good. That is, while it's not exactly pulling punches*, you don't walk away crying. Or wouldn't, even if you were me.

* I'm actually not entirely convinced that it is not pulling punches. The book gives little sense of the scale of incarceration in Stalin's USSR, nor the paranoia attendant in the populace. Which perhaps is reasonable, since Solzhenitsyn spent most of those years in the gulag, not in public. Amis paints a much more bleak and horror-ridden portrait of those times and places, and i wonder if Solzhenitsyn (i'm going to pronounce that "sol-zhen it sin", just so you know) was encouraged (or not) to water down the account.


Back to The Martian Chronicles.


Oh! Also !
Put it on your calendar, Monday, November 28, David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody will uh be at the Herbst Theater in SF. $18.50.
http://www.cityarts.net/n.moody.html


hmm - blogger here is screwing up my entries. it keeps substituting like open-font tags for close-span tags or something.

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