Review of “The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This three-volume book set won a Nobel Prize, so there isn’t much for me to add about its impact on the literary world. It describes the Soviet forced-labor, penal system in an entertaining style, blending personal experience with anecdotes and documented evidence from other camp survivors. It is nonfiction but neither is it autobiographical nor a documentary; it falls in a no-mans-land between personal opinion and an angry and disillusioned tirade. The first volume addressed the Soviet judicial system at a basic level, through the eyes of those ground up in its gears, which turned without purpose or guidance.
This volume explores life in the “Special Camps”, slave-labor facilities reserved for “58s”–political prisoners. The author describes what it’s like to become less than human through a relentless campaign of dehumanization and torture that lasts years, if not decades, for those consigned by the state to develop natural resources in regions where no one would voluntarily go. It is a brutal story of starvation, continuous mental and physical abuse, and death at the hands of the “natives'” own government. The vast majority of the “sons of the gulag” died in remote regions of Siberia, or at the gates of Moscow itself in camps, often comprising tents (in -30F weather!) over a period spanning decades. The inhumane conditions were often equally applied to women and children, as well as men.
The author convincingly portrays the Gulag as a microcosm of Soviet society, and, in my opinion, the human race as a whole. He exquisitely reveals the interaction of individuals as they form a new society, even in such harsh conditions. Cheks (Soviet masters) and Zeks (the 58s), joined by hardened criminals and exiled “free” people need each other to survive in the topsy-turvy world of Soviet Russia, but it is a marriage born in hell and consummated on the wind-ravaged, frozen steppe of Asia.
The English version was, of course, translated from Russian; the translator did an excellent job finding English and American phrases to match the original text–for example, the loyal Communists who found themselves labeled 58s and accepted their imminent demise in a death camp as due to something they did unawares, were, in the author’s opinion, pigheaded. So true.
This is another long volume in a saga that could go on for many more volumes, but there is only one more which I am currently reading. However, this is a review of this book; and my opinion is that it is too long, often awkwardly written, and doesn’t include enough autobiographical details. The author is trying to (I think) distance himself from what he refers to in Volume 3 as (paraphrasing) one of the most profound periods of his life.
Read it at your own risk.
Review of “Foundation and Earth” by Isaac Asimov
This is the final episode of the Foundation series, written by my favorite SF writer. I don’t know how one might properly finish such an epic series of novels (they cover more than 500 years), but I found the ending unsatisfying. Several questions raised in this book will remain unanswered…
Asimov writes in a very dated style, cumbersome and wordy, which dampens the reader’s anticipation. There is a lot of introspection by the characters, and the narrator is omniscient–knowing every character’s non-spoken emotional response in every scene. I don’t care for that style myself, but he uses multiple POVs most of the time.
The characters are on a galaxy-spanning search for Earth, the ancestral home of humanity, after 20,000 years of expansion into the Milky Way. They get into some tough scrapes and escape thanks to a character with uncanny powers of mental control that span galactic scales. Talk about non-local quantum entanglement! This story is as much about the potential pathways of civilization as their quest for Earth. How many cultures and phenotypes can evolve in twenty millennia? Very imaginative and creative.
In the preface, Asimov says he didn’t want to write any more Foundation novels, but the franchise’s resurgence among SF fans in the 80s put pressure on him (from his editor) to write this book. His reluctance to write it shows in the lackluster response to some questions and the silver bullet represented by one member of the group. However, as in his early days, he ups the ante in the ending, demonstrating one way all galactic roads might lead back to Earth, the cradle of humanity.
This book is fine as a standalone story and, to be honest, I didn’t remember much of the previous three novels. With SF there is always more backstory than the author can include. It’s is a fun book, especially the ongoing debate between the characters about individuality versus group consciousness. Despite the convincing arguments made for shared consciousness across the galaxy, I think something would be lost–maybe the unbridled creativity of “Isolates” like me experiencing reality alone.
Maybe I’m not ready for the future…
Review of “ALL THE DARK WE WILL NOT SEE” by Michael B. Neff
If only my sore eyes, bloodshot from pollen, stress, and lack of sleep, had noticed the first ill omen, waving like a red flag on Waimea beach when surf’s up, on the scintillating cover of this book. A list of names that reads like the playbill for Superman, after he had saved the world yet again, whose meaning I didn’t grasp until my mind had been dulled by drinking in this tale of star-crossed lovers swimming in a shark-infested bay connected to an ocean filled by prehistoric behemoths, a vast chasm only glimpsed by their perspicacious intellects, unobserved by unsuspecting mental midgets like myself. The forbidding cover, a vigilant guardian of truth and their giant eagle, reached into the depths of my soul, like a Stephen King novel on a stormy night, and warned me as clearly as a sunny day, to go no further. Yet I was driven by the will of Vishnu …
Enough of that. My point is that this book is written like poetry, filled with allegory and metaphors. At first I thought this was a great way to reveal Edison Eden’s tragicomic perspective, but the author used it for the narrator … pretty much everyone whose point of view is displayed in this tragic tale of deception, manipulation, betrayal and outright insanity. The feelings of the characters are amplified wildly by the writing style. It was a bit much for me.
This is a well-written book with some annoying grammatical errors, e.g., systematic missing possessive apostrophes in the same person’s name. Almost like a machine wrote it. Probably the publisher’s editing software.
This is a work of fiction, so the Office of Special Counsel and several other whistleblower protection agencies, were replaced by the fictitious Office of Whistleblower Counsel in the novel. The author weaves a believable imaginary world around this dim space in a concrete bastion erected on K Street, populate by gods, demons, acolytes, and other celestial beings.
It isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s a good read if you like metaphorical writing …
Review of “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson
I’m not certain where to start. This long book (563 pp) is actually two books, one fiction, the other nonfiction, interweaved so that the reader can’t follow either story. The central plot involves a lonely middle-aged woman who finds a friend in the most unlikely of places. It follows her career with the Ministry for the Future over about 25 years. The title comes from the second, nonfiction, story wedged into the real story. This is the author’s vision of the world over the next few decades; global warming is a central theme, but there are many other questions. In fact the backstory takes over the book. About half the chapters are explanations of various economic indices, technologies, and social theories that relate to the current plethora of problems confronting earth and humanity. However, this nonfiction narrative is presented as fiction, i.e., no footnotes, references, or bibliography. I’m sure they tried to get all these details correct but I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t care for “what if” nonfiction.
The choice of narration style is confusing. In fact, there may be three books contained in these pages: the main story is told in a normal manner by a third person narrator, with multiple points of view (actually I think only two), and literary attention paid to mundane details in Zurich, Switzerland. But this is from the perspective of the central character, who loves Zurich, even though she never bothered to learn Swiss German (what?). I felt like I was learning German from all the street names and other paraphernalia.
The nonfiction book is a series of essays of various aspects of society and technology, including excruciating details about glacial mechanics (boring!), finance, etc. This is also told by a third-person narrator, like reading a technical report.
The third book is a series of comments and reflections by people who live through the time period presented in the book, all in first-person, often with no identification. They often have no bearing on the plot. Redundant. These are interspersed with metaphysical comments from … the sun, other nonliving agents. Kind of like poetic interludes. And there are the Socratic interludes, in which unnamed persons debate various philosophical points.
I see what the author was trying to do, but it doesn’t work for me. It reads like they had three manuscripts (or piles of notes) on their desk, and jammed them together. Thus there is no flow and the reader is always having to shift reading mode while looking hopelessly for a plot.
And then there’s grammar and punctuation. I was looking for a pattern here: run-on sentences that lost their subject on their meandering path; sentence fragments; quotation marks for dialogue … or not. I thought perhaps the three threads used different writing styles to punctuate their mood, but I found nothing. The main story used quotation marks haphazardly. I had to reread at least one sentence on every page, often more. This is a clumsily written book.
The cover proclaims that this is one of Barrack Obama’s favorite books of the year. I doubt he finished it, just like the person who gave it to me, three-quarters completed – I finished it, not because it was entertaining or a pleasant diversion. I’m just a stubborn reader.
I could go on, but it isn’t worth the effort …
Review of “Dreams in the Eternal Machine” by Deni Ellis Béchard
There is no surprise ending to this speculative science-fiction novel. The secret is in the title and explicitly introduced in the first few pages. Everyone on earth, including the planet itself, has been assimilated by an artificial super intelligence whose rapid development far surpassed its creator’s imagination. So what is the plot?
Wrapped in a science fiction cover is a Shakespearean story of betrayal between young people who accidentally meet in an American divided by civil war. Their story is integrated with their separate experiences after assimilation into the machine, and it remains unresolved. The only other evidence of a plot is the general decline in cognitive and emotional wellbeing of the majority of people. This process is explored through several characters whose importance to the plot is never clear. In fact, no one really stood out as being the central character, other than the two young people mentioned above. Having a plot doesn’t require the central character to succeed; failure is the stuff of tragedy and perfectly okay, but no one really struggled against the antagonist (obviously the eternal machine). Their situation is hopeless and there is no chance of escape — not even the slightest. Hopeless.
Given the lack of a coherent plot or even a central character, this story is fundamentally about the response of people to a hopeless situation in which there are no threats of any kind. The machine not only feeds and cares for its dependents, it creates any world they want to see and experience. Spoiler alert: Heaven gets old after a few centuries.
The writing is very good, and the author doesn’t miss a trick to get an agent’s attention and produce a popular book. It seems to me that agents probably don’t think very hard about the books they represent. And, of course, the reader doesn’t find out until it’s too late, the money spent. That’s how I felt. As far as the reviews, I never cease to be amazed at the glowing reviews written about this novel; I guess critics don’t read books either.
Review of “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This review isn’t going to be as long as this literary classic (985 pp). I’ll skip all the usual analyses about the author’s commentary on contemporary Russian society (circa 1880), although it is set in a small village during the 1840s. The three brothers, Dmitry, Ivan and Aleksey, represent three types of character: rash and brutal; thoughtful and intelligent; emotional and sympathetic. The story centers on Dmitry, who has an ongoing conflict with their father Fyodor over his inheritance from his deceased mother. They are also in love with the same young woman. The tension is palpable and leads to violence. Eventually, Fyodor is murdered and Dmitry is tried for the crime and found guilty by a jury in a fair trial; the incriminating circumstantial evidence is simply too much to overcome. Enough of plot details.
No character is too minor to have their life described in detail, even if they have no relevance to the story. These ancillary stories make up about half the book, including entire chapters, filled with characters who serve no purpose other than showing something about life and death in nineteenth century Russia. The writing is extremely wordy. Some sentences are half a page long; some paragraphs several pages long; none of this makes sense from a literary perspective but appears to be whimsical. No thought by any character is left untouched by a narrator who claims to live in this village, but has the superpower of reading everyone’s mind. Nothing is left for the reader to figure out; every act, desire, emotion is fully explored through contrived scenes that make certain of this.
This book is considered a classic of existentialism for good reason: the characters make no attempt to change or even offer excuses; their innate personality is the reason for the most scandalous behavior — take me as I am or leave me alone! This is the appeal of this gritty story of bad decisions leading to foreseeable outcomes. The take-home message is that people cannot change who they are and should embrace their weaknesses as much as their strengths.
I cannot recommend this book. It is simply too long, filled with extraneous stories, and poorly written. However, if you want to have a taste of the Russian love of pain and suffering, I would suggest some short stories by Chekhov.
Review of “Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre” edited by Walter Kaufmann
This book contains excerpts and essays written by a number of writers who’ve been identified with Existentialism. Apparently, no one wanted to be identified with the new philosophy; furthermore, the common thread between these authors is the analytical method associated with this movement, but they were interested in different questions. Some of them are simply writers who revealed Existentialist ideas through their characters; several were theologians looking for a way to find the roots of Christianity; it wasn’t until Sartre that someone called themself an Existentialist.
These authors (except the professional writers like Dostoevsky and Camus) write horribly; even the best of the philosophers (Sartre) wrote obscurely, whatever he was trying to say lost in recursive, circular reasoning that abused common words like “being” to the point of insanity. His fiction was fine, however, which leads me to conclude that these serious thinkers were struggling to describe what today might be called “mindfulness”, by which I do not mean meditation but, rather, awareness of the whole mind-body system and how it is impacted by our actions and thoughts. I could be way off base there because I really couldn’t say what Existentialism is, after reading these critical works.
But I don’t feel too bad because this was a complaint mentioned by Kaufmann (a renowned philosopher); Existentialism isn’t a dogma or ideology, but instead an incomplete and abstract approach to being in yourself and true to who you really are all the time.
I’ve heard various rumors about several of the authors included in this anthology (especially Nietzsche and Sartre), but the editor addressed some of these in the prefaces. I think, from this brief introduction, that their ideas changed over time and the statements accredited to them are both taken out of context and from earlier periods of their careers, when they were more likely to say outlandish things for the hell of it.
I can’t really recommend this book because so many of the essays are unintelligible; however, I wrote copious notes within its pages and plan to revisit it.
I hate finishing a book and don’t know what it was about …
Timothy R. Keen 
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