It's been quite a long time since I read this book, but it was recommended to me by Jack Bangerter, my best friend in high school. I remember it being brilliant, beautiful and just a solid, well developed novel with memorable characterization and an unflinching look at life and terminal illness. There was, if I remember properly, a magnificent main character and then a whole cast of supporting characters all enduring a rather bleak Soviet prison and maintaining impossibly poignant relationships among themselves and their few rare visitors. It was probably hugely depressing like everything else I like, but don't let that stop you, unless you're that kind of person, in which case you should probably disregard all of my recommendations. ( )

A very moving story of life and death, of disease and recovery, of love and discovery. We get a glimpse of the lives of the patients in the male cancer ward, and the medical team, none of whom escaped the long and heavy arm of the Stalin regime and thus have a story to tell. The main character, Kostoglotov is a labor camp survivor and is an "exile in perpetuity", then there is the loyal party member Pavel Nikolayevich; a talented, ambitious young man, a couple of young students, some old Khazaks and Uzbeks, other exiles -- the ward represents a cross-section of Russia who for all they represented in the outside world, were all reduced and made equal by cancer to the same sorry mass of misery.

From the discussions that occur between the characters, we get a picture of Stalinist Russia. They have intense debates about morality, about the role of medicine. Fiercely defended individual positions reveal the tension of class relations. There is, however, a wonderful dynamism in these exchanges, even if some were bitter and felt pointless -- it showed that the damage in their bodies had not touched their minds. In a way, this is symbolic – the cancer in the society brought by the regime could reach and even destroy the body, but never the mind.

This novel was depressing a lot of times, one feels very much for their agony and the seeming hopeless battle against cancer, but we also see strength especially on the part of the doctors, who despite their own personal battles, try to overcome severe resource limitations with great ingenuity and much hard work, becoming themselves symbols of hope and deliverance. Authentic in its portrayal (Solzhenitsyn himself was a patient in a cancer ward, after his release from the camps), Solzhenitsyn doesn't spare us from anything – we feel the daily grind of treatment and care, denial, the shadow of death looming over each bedside, the fear of death, resignation. We feel Kostoglotov's tortured personality, his wonder, curiosity, pig-headedness, and difficulty to accept love, acceptance – sensations he had learned to forget during his long, hard years in the prison camps. The story ends with Kostoglotov's release, but we do not know what is in store for him – we continue to feel his powerlessness -- against a remission, and the uncertainty of the sweeping changes that were taking place after Stalin's death.

Solzhenitsyn speaks with authority because he has been there. His fiction is no fiction at all – they are powerful accounts of true events, of real lives, of the weight of history, and of some unknown source within us of frail but unyielding hope against all odds. There is much cruelty and injustice, but there is also redemption. This is the stuff of truly great literature. ( )

Essential reading for those who think socialism will bring us social harmony and justice. ( )

Unfinished (only reached page 76). This was dull. Obviously one does not read Solzhenitsyn for fun, but this was nowhere near as interesting as First Circle and didn't look like it was going to pick up anytime soon.

Solzhenitsyn's usual well drawn characters playing out a moral drama that is only understood by the lone, sensitive, thinking man who has been thru the schools of WWII and the Gulag. ( )