Blood Meridian, by Cormac Mccarthy

Blood Meridian, by Cormac Mccarthy

Blood Meridian is Cormac Mccarthy’s other great masterpiece. Never have I personally encountered a work of such hypnotic power, as this. One get’s the sense on reading it, that the Mccarthy may in fact be insane, for the words on the page seem to appear, fully-formed, as if from a delirium. It is a nightmare of such depravity it lacks comprehension.

It is also a classic. What Harold Bloom calls, ‘a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and universal tragedy of blood [...] Comparable to Melville and Faulkner.’ Indeed, the only other book that I have read which seems even remotely similar is Dante’s Inferno.

‘The Kid’ is the hero of the novel, but Mccarthy pitilessly denies us access to his character, personality or conscience. This makes him a cypher; a pair of eyes, in which a unfolding tapestry of violence can be witnessed. There are no good guys or bad guys in this world, no purpose or motive, message or moral. Everything exists in and of itself, where Mccarthy ‘converts goriness into a terrifying art.’ 

The opening is memorable, for it is, precisely the visual dimension of the work, that takes precedent:

‘See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt [...] Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. [...] his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost [...] Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.’ 

This is all we learn of the Kid’s life. A mere summary of three pages, before he dwindles into another world. After leaving home, he joins the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries recruited by the US government to roam the deserts of the American West and kill indians. Here, the Kid learns that his prior life has been inconsequential, and that only in battle, does he truly live. Out on the killing fields he meets ‘the most frightening figure in all of American Literature,’ Judge Holden. A Nietzschean warmonger who evokes philosophy, law, and religion to justify his bloodlust. His pronouncement on the world is this:

‘The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world’ ‘Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.’

This is the mandate he lives by, and indeed its hard to stomach some of the outrages he incites because of it. 

‘Dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. [....] One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand [....] and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth.’

The indians are no better: 

‘hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream [...] One in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil [...]  Passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs [...] gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs.’

Rape, murder, genocide, infanticide, nothing is beyond limits in Blood Meridian. The story  culminates in a dream like encounter out in the far reaches of the  desert, with the Kid fighting for his survival. Even then there is a sense that this landscape of savagery will never end. War ‘never sleeps [..] and will never die.’ 

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The most amazing part of the book for me, is Mccarthy’s language, comparable only to Milton in stature. The depictions of the landscape are especially beautiful, although the archaic wording, strange syntax and grammar, take some getting use too:

‘The wind blew the white pumice from the crests like the spume from sea swells and the sand was scalloped and fraily shaped and nothing else was there save random polished bones.’

‘Ice had frozen on the rock and the myriad of icicles among the conifers glistened blood red in the reflected light of the sunset spread across the prairie to the west.’

‘Spectra horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat [...] Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings’

Wow, I just love it!

Some critics have argued that Blood Meridian is nihilistic. Others believe that the work is strongly moral, and that ‘judge holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honour in the years to come.’ To me this all seems beside the point. Mccarthey’s novels, and this one particularly, seem to exist only as visual feasts. He is an author concerned with images alone. This is where he shines.

For me, Blood Meridian, is perhaps the only frightening book I’ve read, for the level of violence can’t be surpassed. Yet the scenes, are not fictional, and can be read in accounts of battle since time immemorial. This is why the work is so powerful. Again, I return to my original point, Blood Meridian doesn’t even seem a work of fiction, nor crafted by human hands, but appears like some demonic testament springing from hell, and perhaps bringing a prophecy for the future. 

Primo Levi: If This is a Man and the Truce

If This is a Man. The Truce, by Primo Levi

 It is in the midst of utter desolation that the Levi discovers the real meaning of his predicament:

‘That precisely because the lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive to tell the story to bear witness; that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization [...] We still possess one power, the power to refuse our consent.’

Indeed, Levi not only survives Auschwitz, but through his profound morality, was able to embody the personal and collective suffering of the Jewish Race. In turn, he became a champion for all the world. One of the truly great writers and emancipators of the modern era, who was able to raise the banner of freedom at all costs. Before this status however, he must content, with the nightmare world he found himself within. 

‘In an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared,’ and ‘for the first time we became aware, that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man. In a moment of prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: We had reached the bottom. It is is not possible to sink lower than this.' ‘Imagine now a man deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, habits, his clothes, in short of everything he possesses: He will be a hollow man reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of his dignity and restraint.’

Levi lost everything within Auschwitz. He became an shell of a man, beset with hunger, sickness and despair. Nevertheless, he believed his suffering had value. That ‘no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis.’  Furthermore by reflecting on the experience he was able to understand why the Holocaust occurred in the first place.

‘For those survivors remembering is a duty. They do not want to forget, because they understand that their experiences were not meaningless, that the camps were not an accident, an unforeseen happening. The nazi camps were the apex the culmination of fascism in Europe’ In the Truce he goes further stating, ‘we felt we had something to say, enormous things to say to every German [...] We felt an urgent need to settle our accounts. to ask them to explain and comment [...] they ought as a sacred duty to listen, to learn everything immediately from us.’ 

Of course this intellectual analysis doesn’t help in the camp itself, and Levi has to wrestle with the fundamental problem of why some men lived and others died. For him, the camp can be separated into a dichotomy of the ‘drowned and saved.’ Those who survive do so because they possess strength, cunning and treachery. The survivor ‘will become stronger, and so will be feared, and he who is feared, is ipso facto, a candidate for survival.’ Those that die, do so because they are weaker, ‘to sink is the easiest of matters [....] [men] who finished in the gas chambers have the same story or more exactly have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom like streams that run down to the sea.’

 Camp life is a microcosm of wider society, only without the necessary safe guards . The old law of jungle comes into play, man in a state of nature, bound to the principles of evolution, where one beast devours the other. Levi quite rightly asks, ‘is this a man?’ for when humanity is reduced to raw hunger and blind necessity, disturbing visions emerge. Nevertheless, Levi is able to see past this flaw  to the integrity beneath. In The Truce particularly, we learn of the gradual adjustment to living on the outside, and a life that offers a better future. 

While not a pleasant read ‘If This is a Man’ is a truly important book, for not only does it bear witness to such terrible events, but also shows with the moral clarity of a genius, why and how such experiences came to be. Levi shows, that literature is not redundant, that the world is not a dream, and life not a metaphysical event. That through all the bloodshed, we still share our common ground.  That kindness, tolerance and the idea of freedom, renew the world and a world that is as real as it gets. And as such, there is always a need for men to tell such stories, for suffering precedes wisdom.

Mike Tyson: The Undisputed Truth, My Autobiography

Mike Tyson: The Undisputed Truth

Let me start with a confession. I think Mike Tyson is a great guy, and to me, he’s an inspiration and role-model. I have always been drawn to those men who have lived chaotic, extreme, and often destructive lives. Those people who have plummeted to the depths of despair, but also the peaks of exaltation. Those individuals who have lived a reckless lifestyle, hurtling towards their own demise, and don’t care to stop it. I’m not sure what that says about myself, but it’s like Jack Kerouac said: ‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars!’

With that being said Mike Tyson fits the criteria. A man of all qualities: Heavyweight champion, convicted rapist, street thug, psychiatric patient, and Hall of Fame Boxer. He has lived an interesting life to say the least. What struck me most about Tyson is recent years is how much he has changed, and how he is now simply, a good man. Considering his background, and where he came from, this is an astonishing, if not a superhuman feat.

He grew up in the Brownsville slums of Brooklyn New York. ‘It was a very horrific, tough and a gruesome kind of place [...] Cops were always driving by with their sirens on; ambulances always coming to pick someone up; guns going off, people getting stabbed [...] I never really felt safe on those streets.’ He had no father in childhood, his mother died when he was 16, his sister died when he was 24, and on top of that, he saw many friends brutally slain in gang violence. It was definitely a hard knock life. Surprisingly, Tyson was bulled. He says ‘I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying.’ ‘I knew that the demons from my childhood were on my trail everywhere I went [...] that little boy that had been bullied, brutalized and abused.’ After getting involved in gangs, and armed robbery, he ends up in the juvenile penitentiary, where he takes up boxing with legendary trainer Cus d’Amato. What follows is a superstar rise to the top of professional boxing. 

However, tragedy struck when Cus D’Amato died just before Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion. For Tyson, this was like loosing a father, and the only person who ever loved him. He states ‘By the time I won the belt I was truly a wrecked soul.’ From here on out, Tyson lived reckless lifestyle, and in all honesty, it’s miraculous he survived at all. He says: ‘So what did I care if I died. I never had no fucking life. What did I have to look forward to?’ It is too difficult to pull out individual stories, due to the sheer number of them. Tyson’s excess lifestyle involved, coke, crack, cannabis, orgies, alcohol, 42 girlfriends, sex addiction, and bipolar disorder. Not to mention rape, prison, lawsuits and biting.

We all know the story from there. When talking about the Lennox Lewis fight, Tyson is honest: ‘All those years of snorting coke and drinking and smoking weed and screwing around with massive amounts of women had finally taken their toll [...] Iron Mike had brought me too much pain, too many lawsuits, too much hate from the public, the stigma I was a rapist [...] Each punch I took from Lewis, chipped away at that pose, that persona. And I was a willing participant in its destruction.’  A rather ignominious end for one of the greatest fighters who ever lived, but I’m more interested in Tyson outside the ring, and after years of self-destruction, his gradual recovery.

He says: ‘One day I woke up and said to myself, I ain’t going to do this shit no more. I wanted to be awake, I want to be of service. I wanted to be a player in the game of life, functioning with all your marbles and responding to the best of your ability.’ ‘its not always a happy ending when you talk about recovery, but when endings our happy, they’re almost a godsend. People are going to die in our family, they’re going to run away and get high and OD. [...] Getting involved in the recovery program was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. These are great people and they never get enough credit from our society.’

 Unfortunately in 2009, Mike Tyson suffered another loss this time his baby daughter Exodus in a freak accident on a treadmill. Tyson states: ‘Loosing exodus was the most bitter and helpless feeling I ever had in my life. [...] Its been four years now and I still don’t know how I’m going to survive this.’ One never completely recovers, and so it is inevitable, that Tyson still suffers the despair and emptiness of his early years. However there is a new commitment to at least try to be a better man. He’s now more reflective now: ‘I’m glad I’m not that guy anymore [...] Doing good feels better than doing bad. Believe me I should know. I’ve gotten away with doing a lot of bad things. Theres no satisfaction in that, only in doing good. [...] I still have a lot of work to do. I have to try and love myself. I’m learning to live in this world, and be happy.’

Tyson’s early life was dysfunctional to say the least, and those feelings accumulated at such a vulnerable age don’t just go away. On bad days, the boxer muses: ‘I’ve been betrayed so much in my life that I don’t trust people now. When people make you feel incapable of being loved, you keep those feelings and they never go away. And when you feel incapable of being loved, then you want to hurt people and do bad things. [...] It doesn’t mean anything to anybody but when you come from sewage it means a lot [...] I just know I’m going to hell. And I was born in hell.’ 

Despite this grim tug of war between two faces of the same soul, Tyson is now relatively stable in no small part to his family. The story ends with him reading his favourite Napoleon letter addressed Josephine, but its not what you think. “‘you are my second, a better self, you are my virtue, you are my merit, you are my hope, my heaven, my intercessor, you are my guardian angel, how I love you so’ Tyson then says. ‘I read that out loud and then Kiki and I cry together. Ain’t that something?

 It really is! From ghetto rugrat and armed criminal, to Mike Tyson husband and father. As Charles Dickens said ‘Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.’ I would vouch to say it is now quite obvious, that Tyson’s rage really stems from his vulnerability and suffering. ‘That shame of being poor, gave me more pain than anything in my life.’ In such a case, I think we can forgive him for his other behaviour. 

So for me, this was truly an amazing book and one I am very grateful for. To see someone like Mike Tyson, redeem all that anger, despair and addiction into something good, is in my mind amazing. Apart from that, Tyson is a born storyteller, and an eccentric, hilarious guy. What shines through more than anything else though is his warmth and humanity. For me this makes it the best book I’ve read in probably the whole year!

Art from My School Days

The Genius that is Arthur Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer

When I told my friend, my favourite philosopher was Arthur Schopenhauer, he said ‘ah the philosopher for smack heads.’ Alas I am not a smack head, but perhaps there is something in the notion. For Schopenhauer is a troubling read. He sees the world as it really is, behind the tyranny of modern existence, many people live lives that are embodiments of pain and heartache. As such I prefer the term liberator, for such philosophers, emancipate us from the bondage of the living condition into the sublime world of pure thought. In turn they show us a glimpse of recognition and understanding, even across the vast distance of space and time.

Jung says of Schopenhauer: ‘He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us [...] Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundamentals of the universe.’ 

Schopenhauer was not, like Nietzsche (who, incidentally, seems to be one of the most disgusting individuals who ever lived). He was a nihilist and he didn’t hate the world, he pitied it and spoke with the indignation of someone who has suffered from it. Alas, there is a method to his madness, and this is why I call him a liberator, for he was willing to plug life to the depths, and go deep down in the mire, in order to rescue it.

Nevertheless he was a strange character. He would give lectures to empty university halls, carry around a pet poodle, and repeat obsessively the same walk every day for approximately sixty years. Clearly a mind, that has reached the end of its tether but I love him for it!

And now what exactly did Schopenhauer say? First we must remember he was a follower of Plato and Kant. He believed the ‘allegory of the cave’, and of Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself.’ As such he is a shining star in the tradition of idealism. 

In more simple terms, he believed behind the appearance of reality, there exists a greater spiritual one. His opening lines: ‘The world is my representation,’ means precisely this: The world is whatever I see it to be at any given moment. Everything in existence is really only a cheap imitation and poor copy, of an unborn, uncreated, and unconditioned archetype, which exists beyond the veil.

In today’s terms, this is idealism is quite unpopular. We tend to think as ‘Positivists’, meaning we think in terms of concrete physicality. Materialism is the only world that exists. There is no God, no Spirit, no Forms or Archetypes. In fact, the veil is a crude metaphor for something which doesn’t exist. We have one life and thats that.

Schopenhauer, on the other hand, did see something behind existence, and behind the everyday appearance of things. However, to him it was something diabolical and a constant thorn humanity had to deal with.

He called it ‘Will’ or in longer terms: ‘The Will-to-Live.’  He claimed behind the mere tapestry of phenomena was a blind and unified necessity, which compelled universe to life. A Buddhist would label it ‘Desire’ and it is fundamental core of existence. We can imagine it as a sort of unconscious energy which robs us of freewill, and only causes blind, hopeless striving. Another metaphor, would be, humanity as a blindfolded rider, and ‘Will’ is the out of control horse on which he is astride.

Why are we born? why do we procreate? why do the stars shine? why does the bird fly? why do plants grow? why do clouds arise? Why did the galaxies form, and the universe beget? The answer: ‘Will’, the ‘will-to-live’. A hidden magic which makes everything in existence blindly desire and compel it to life.

They are difficult concepts to get one’s head around but Schopenhauer makes things clear. It is his emotive and pristine language which is one of his chief appeals, not to mention his courageous attempts to pin down the world for what it is. 

He states: ‘It is really incredible how meaningless and insignificant when seen from without, and how dull and senseless when felt from within, is the course of the great majority of men [...] It is weary longing and worrying, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages [....] We are like clockwork that is wound up and goes without knowing why. Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement, and measure by measure with insignificant variations. Every individual every human apparition and its course of life is only one more short dream of the endless spirit of nature the persistent will-to-live is only one more fleeting form playfully sketched by it on its infinite page, space and time [....] All these fleeting forms these empty fancies must be paid for by the whole Will to live in all its intensity, with many deep sorrows, and finally with bitter death [...] If [we were] Finally, we were to bring to the sight of everyone the terrible suffering and afflictions to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror.’

For Schopenhauer, because appearance is ‘representation’ and essence is ‘Will’ he came to some thoroughly alarming conclusions about life itself. If we are nothing more than bodies which imbibe the blind striving of an anonymous, incognate and insensate ‘Will’, then really, we are condemned to suffer, because desire also specifies a lack, and fulfillment a negation.

As such he states:

‘We see striving everywhere, struggling and fighting, and hence always as suffering. Thus there is no ultimate aim of striving, means that there is no measure or end of suffering’ and life swings ‘like a pendulum to a fro between pain and boredom’

There is only one cure for the world and it is not Christian eternity, but the opposite. It is the Buddhist concept of extinction, or more philosophically, renunciation, because in the long run, only by the voluntary divestment of power and life, can the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation end. Renunciation will extinguish the Will-to-Live, and also with it, the endless treadmill of suffering man is trapped on. This is not a call to suicide, but a call to the lofty heights of stoical compassion, and detachment. The supreme examples would be Buddha or Christ. 

So Schopenhauer was a Pessimist, but to me, his conclusions are logically correct, and I would tend to agree with him on the quiet when he says:

‘Optimism...where it not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbour nothing but words under their foreheads, seem to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.’ It is Schopenhauer’s chief merit, that before anyone else, he realized that often life is the bitterest pill to swallow. 

Once in a while it is important to remember who we are:

We are like Buddha, who left the luxury world of royalty, pomp and glitz, to travel outside the palace walls, only to encounter old age, sickness, and death, yet somehow aimed to redeem suffering and turn it into truth and goodness.

As such, we need these liberators, to follow through such knowledge to its final end, and somehow rescue humanity from the jaws of destruction. 

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

Tomorrow is the 75th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, also known as the ‘Night of Broken Glass.’  Over the course of only two days, in Winter 1938, the SA paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party devastated the German-Jewish community. Businesses were smashed, homes destroyed, and civilians killed. It was a sign of things to come. 

Markus Zusak’s Book Thief, is a stout reminder of such a time, but also how the lives of ordinary Germans were intwined with the fate of their Jewish Neighbors. 

Liesel Meminger is the hero of the novel, and more particularly she is a stealer of stories. After witnessing the death of her younger brother, and being abandoned to foster parents, she increasingly learns to explore the world of family, friendship, and her country, by books and words. They become, a blessing and a curse.

The Book Thief, has a rich tapestry of colourful characters. Hans Hubermann and his wife Rosa Hubermann are the doting family Liesel grows up under. Hans paints, plays the accordion, and rolls cigarettes. Rosa berates and scolds, while being a washer-woman, but underneath she has a soft heart. On the same street, is Liesel’s best friend Rudy Steiner, a boy who wants to run like Jesse Owens. And Hidden in her basement is Max Vandeburg, a Jewish Fist Fighter, who is writing down his life story, and hiding out.

Navigating the perils of adolescence is hard enough, but for Liesel it will involve dealing with the Nazi state. In fact, in time, the whole of her street, will all have to come to terms, with the fate of their country, and its collective actions during the war.

For myself, the novel reminds me of the best work of Dickens. The characters are larger than life, and instantly lovable. The stories they share are timeless, because they are about the most important things in this life: Growing up, the bonds of friendship, family, and the depth and limit of human kindness. 

To me, the most interesting aspect of the novel is the narrator. None other than Death himself! On the surface, the Grip Reaper appears as a kind undertaker, conscripted into a job he hates, and with a boss who has unaccountably vanished! In Nazi Germany his workload is unprecedentedly high. It is busy time, but more to point, Death is haunted by his line of work. As an old friend, who does his duty, he benevolently carries off human beings, from their plight, into eternity, and mourns their loss after they’re gone.

However, in my opinion, there is something shady about this character Death. While he waxes poetically about the loss of life, and the terrible burden he is made to bear, there is something sentimental, even glib, in his manner. Beneath all the beautiful syntax and philosophical musings, Death is a greedy sensualist, who chooses form over substance.  

For example, he has an uncanny ability to talk of individuals as if they were inanimate objects. ‘Rosa Hubermann, looked like a small wardrobe,’ Liesel has ‘wire shins’ and ‘coat hanger arms,’ and Max Vandeburg appears like ‘a struck match.’

 In opposition, he refers to the landscape itself as if it were a human being. The street ‘is shaped like a broken arm [...] These houses were almost like lepers’ and they are, ‘infected sores on the German terrain.’

As much as he is ‘haunted by humans,’ we, should be even more haunted by his appetite for colours. Although he claims to like them all, there are only three he feels intensely. ‘They fall on top of each other. The scribbled signature Black, onto the blinding global White, onto the thick soupy Red.’ In other words, the colours and design of Nazi flag and Swastika!

Zusak’s Book Thief is a timeless tale of the human spirit. It is also told with linguistic flare and creativity. Like Liesel we will be impressed and awed by the power of words. It is a novel which, asks some important questions about responsibility and choice, and carries a hidden depth, which means it can be reread over and over again. More so, than anything else, it shows the innocence of adolescence, and burden of adulthood which all children must inherit. 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is a novel about survival. As soon as the narrator is awoken by the military reveille, in the freezing cold lice-infested bunk, he recalls some advice he has been given:

‘A man can live here, just like anywhere else. Know who pegs out first? The guy who licks out the bowls, puts his faith in the sickbay, or squeals to the Godfather.’

As such, there are to be no heroes and villains. Instead the story, meticulously documents the monotony of life in a Russian labour camp. 

In fact, in a canon that rests between the twin giants of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn’s novel is unusual in its restraint. The scope is myopic, style plain, and the theme subtle. The protagonist, is a witness rather than interpreter, and he only focuses on the daily task of living, hour-by-hour. 

Nevertheless, the deprivation is striking and the starvation unforgiving. Coupled with manual labour and sadistic overseers, it is incrementally devastating. By degrees, the reader becomes aware, just what a struggle it is, to pass twenty-four hours in such a camp.

Most of all, there is the banality of hunger. Denisovich notes: ‘Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp, after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold, and an empty belly, the zek longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in a time of drought [...] For a moment the ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him.’ Inevitably, the notion arrives, ‘Damn this life of ours.’  

Solzhenitsyn’s shows the Gulag, as distinctly apolitical. The significance of the prisoners sentence is lost in the task of staying alive. There is however, a basic economy.

 A prisoner: ‘Could stitch covers for somebody’s mittens from a piece of old lining. Take some rich foreman his felt boots [...] Rush round the store room looking for odd jobs.’ Despite this, ‘there were too many volunteers, swarms of them.’ Bribery is the result: ‘A bit for the warder, a bit for the team foreman [...] There’ll be a little something for the bathhouse man [...] Then theres the barber [...] then they’ll be someone in the CES [...] You’re bound to give some to your neighbour.’ ‘Thieving on the site, thieving in the camp, and there was thieving even before the food left the store.’ A Darwinian struggle and hierarchy, and although unremarkable, some prisoners often end up on the loosing end, with their throat cut in the night.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is an important book. Written by a former Red Army commander, and Soviet prisoner, it is an authentic testimony of the Russian Gulag and its banal horrors. Furthermore it is a stunning read.

Despite the title, the novel isn’t really about a prisoner called Ivan. His story, like that of his fellow inmates, is swallowed up by the dehumanizing beast which has locked them down and reduced them to animals. 

The brutality of its twenty-four hours, is enough to last an eternity.