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Book ReviewsCancer Ward |
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Book: Cancer Ward
Written by: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Average Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5
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A book you can read over and over again.
Rating:
5 / 5
I re-read "Cancer Ward" about every two years and every time I fall in love with the main character--Kostoglotov--all over again. This book tell of the lives of patients and staff in a cancer ward in Russia.
Kostoglotov, the main character, is a man unfairly exiled under Stalin. He is a normal person like you or me who is living a life of perpetual exile. And then he gets cancer and comes to the ward barely clinging to life.
The book chronicles the lives of several people in the Cancer Ward. The book follows the lives of a couple of nurses that Kostoglotov flirts with and the life of a nurse he doesn't flirt with. There is the young student, the government official, and other cancer patients. Each one deals with cancer in their own way.
It is a sad, yet uplifting book about cancer and about Stalin, who really was a big dose of cancer for Russia. More people need to know about how cruel Stalin was. How he exiled people in his purges for no reason other than his own paranoia. Good people like Kostoglotov had their lives stolen from them.
In the end all Kostoglotov wants to do is get out of the cancer ward and back to his friends in his town of perpetual exile. Before he goes home he visits a zoo. I don't want to ruin the ending for you, but every time I read the ending I cry.
Thanks Mr. Solzhenitsyn for exposing Stalin for what he was and giving me the opportunity to read about everyday Russian people.
It almost succeeds.
Rating:
3 / 5
In all great works of literature, such as Doctor Zhivago, there is a sweet aftertaste that we could still relish on our lips long after we have finished the story, or long after we have entered into the lives of the characters. This is in spite (or rather because) of the grueling events that we are happily condemned to share (as readers) with the characters of the story--in the course of their lives. Especially in the case of Doctor Zhivago, the story ends in a way that Transcendence (or whatever you may call it) is very apparent to us. It makes us feel that hardships and sufferings are of little or no significance after the struggle. Vital as they are to our affirmation of life, they have to be surmounted in the end. Yes to Life: this feeling of ultimate triumph will now have to reign supreme over everything.
It is sad to say that this is not the case with Solzhenitsyn's novel, Cancer Ward. Here the author does not carry us to a leap into transcendence. I may sound brutal, but I will honestly say that the author had written this book out of spite. In the conclusion of the book, Oleg Kostoglotov, the book's most anguished protagonist (supposedly the symbol of enormous suffering in the Soviet Era), leaves on a train, diseased both physically and spiritually, and the book's final line reads: "An evil man threw tobacco into Macaque Rhesus' eyes. Just like that."
Although my heart goes out for him, I know the truth inside the heart of the author just as well.
Read the more informed view of Conway A heroic work
Rating:
5 / 5
I want to recommend a review on this site by Lloyd A. Conway as outstanding. It says far more about the book than my brief review will.
I found this to be Solzhenitzyn's finest fictional work. It is written with power and conviction. The optimism displayed by the hero in an apparently hopeless situation supposedly mirrors that of the author in his own fight with and triumph over cancer. The tremendous will and courage of Solzhenitsyn which is part of the legend he made with his own life and writing gives too a sense of the heroic in this work. In adversity in suffering in the depths of a hellish world his heroes find a strength and humanity which is incredible.
I recommend this work above all for its putting the reader in touch with a kind of heroic spirit a kind of courage which our civilization now needs if it is to overcome the forces of terror now working to destroy it.
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