I've also heard good things about Applebaum's book on the Gulag, even if I did get into a tussle over it with Edward Lucas on Johnson's Russia List.
My roommate's dad was a zek -- apparently for petty crime or something like that, but his having a German first name and a French last one probably didn't help matters. What was Solzhenitsyn in for, anyway? I know he was a political.
I really liked First Circle.
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Nobel Lit prize is really sort of a lifetime
> acheivement award, not actually given, unlike, say,
> the National Book Award or the Booker Prize, for
> particular works. Personally I think S is overrated
> altogether, though the First Circle, Cancer Ward,
> Ivan
> Denisovich, and some other relative early works are
> fine and important novels. The Prize Committee is
> highly political.
>
> The GA is a different sort of thing. IT isn't really
> literature at all. It's a compendenium of
> information,
> stories, rumors -- basically a former zek dumping
> his
> clipping file on the floor, Some bits are good, some
> are interesting, some are just myths, but it's not a
> literary account of Gulag in the way that Ginsberg's
> Into The Whirlwind is, much less Natasha MAndestam's
> Hope Agaisnt Hope and Hope Abandoned. I got rid of
> vols 2 and 3, they seemed much of a muchness to me.
> But IU kept vol. 1.
>
> For a history of the Gulag, read Medvedev (from the
> left) or Conquest (from the right), both are good,
> solid, and as far as I know reliable works, though
> Conquest's body count is way too high, as we know
> from
> Getty's and other research.
>
>
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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