Reviews

Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov

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writerreader's review against another edition

4.75

Probably one of the best short story collections by a single author out there. Most of the stories just sting. 🦂
It is bleak stuff made up of gulag life and really breaks how the human spirit can be crushed by a machine.

sloatsj's review against another edition

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5.0

Such an excellent book. Vivid and brutal. The reader becomes the inmate, not gladly, but with great interest (and, unlike the inmates, not inextricably).

Some of the best Gulag/labor camp literature I've ever read. For me it's superior to [b:Survival in Auschwitz|6174|Survival in Auschwitz|Primo Levi|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165555421s/6174.jpg|851110], and richer (if bleak is rich) to [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316638560s/17125.jpg|838042].

tomnana's review

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5.0

The suffering endured in the gulags is boggling. Really any systemized, mass violence eludes reason or imagination. Often, we view these events through a historical context in which numbers of victims, sheer volume of horror, are the point of contact and define the atrocities. This book cannot truly explicate on the magnitude of suffering created in the gulag system. The reality may be that there is no proper reckoning with it. Suffering in Kolyma Stories is personal, the forces which control for ones life are vague and outcomes arbitrary. Perhaps this is the only way you can accurately approach an atrocity. At the very least, if we typically focus on the number of victims, this book ensures that we also know and don't lose sight of the monstrous degree to which an oppressive regime can bear its power with crushing force on one person. Kolyma Stories is a strident illustration of what it means to suffer, and, through absolute deprivation demonstrates what is truly valuable for life.

vision__'s review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

4.75

captaincocanutty's review against another edition

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5.0

Very striking depiction of life in the camp system and what it does to people.

neural_lauren_unreal's review against another edition

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5.0

"I learned that spite is the last human emotion to survive. A starving man has only enough flesh to feel spite — he is indifferent to everything else."