A review by intoxicatedturtle
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2.0

Very disappointing! The author did an excellent job of getting me to care what happens to his character, yet NOTHING ever happens. A "day in the life" is a great literary device if it is a day where something occurs. This however, was similar to a Seinfeld episode, yet without the attempts at humor. Twenty something pages about building a brick wall would be ok if there were some climax, but there's not. Just a brick wall. Perhaps he does an ok job of describing the terror of living in the gulag, but if the reader is familiar with WWII camps (Frankel's "The Search For Meaning", perhaps), then the protagonist's woes seem to be mere discomforts. Although much hinges on the presumption that the character doesn't deserve to be in prison, he is a prisoner nonetheless and his prison experience isn't all that spectacular. Sadly, the book is a real page turner but after reading the pages, I simply felt like I had wasted my time.