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A review by jonfaith
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, David Burg, Nicholas Bethell
4.0
A man of no talent craves long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.
Cancer Ward (CW) consciously strives for the epic, readily aware of the distance between itself and the baggy monsters of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and yet sways in the limitations of the material especially in moral terms. Unlike Europe after the Shoah, the Soviet experiment had different questions to ask itself after Stalin's death. Caught almost in the sway of self-conscious people becoming cynical. I place CW apart from the other major works of Solzhenitsyn and place it instead closer to Grossman's Forever Flowing, another novel about the inmate's impossibility of returning --to normality, to youth, to belief. Memory becomes a clever foe, a challenge.
This is an ensemble piece - similar to First Circle - which pulsates with social discord and apprehension. The patients have all internalized the implications of their illness. The setting is the Thaw of Khrushchev at a clinic in Uzbekistan. The presence of the oncological leads the reader to assume such is a metaphor. Not entirely. Matters are more organic -- the effects of the Purge, the show trials -- they are returning-- as the metaphysical meaning of Remission becomes palpable , even rendered upon the very flesh of the sick. I would be most curious as to what Foucault gathered about this protean display of the abject and possible redemption.
Cancer Ward (CW) consciously strives for the epic, readily aware of the distance between itself and the baggy monsters of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and yet sways in the limitations of the material especially in moral terms. Unlike Europe after the Shoah, the Soviet experiment had different questions to ask itself after Stalin's death. Caught almost in the sway of self-conscious people becoming cynical. I place CW apart from the other major works of Solzhenitsyn and place it instead closer to Grossman's Forever Flowing, another novel about the inmate's impossibility of returning --to normality, to youth, to belief. Memory becomes a clever foe, a challenge.
This is an ensemble piece - similar to First Circle - which pulsates with social discord and apprehension. The patients have all internalized the implications of their illness. The setting is the Thaw of Khrushchev at a clinic in Uzbekistan. The presence of the oncological leads the reader to assume such is a metaphor. Not entirely. Matters are more organic -- the effects of the Purge, the show trials -- they are returning-- as the metaphysical meaning of Remission becomes palpable , even rendered upon the very flesh of the sick. I would be most curious as to what Foucault gathered about this protean display of the abject and possible redemption.