Ian’s Reviews > Life and Fate > Status Update

“Musya watched as sub-units of the SS and SD … and a column of cars belonging to the Gestapo drew up at the gates of the sleeping ghetto. In those few minutes of moonlight she took the measure of the history of our age.”

Creates a vast, vast world, and doesn’t hesitate to jump between characters:

- Lyudmila, whose son is killed in battle at Stalingrad
- Victor, her husband, whose mother (a Jew) was killed by the SS
- Abarchuk, Lyudmila’s former husband, now a political prisoner in the gulag in Siberia

To name only three. Grossman captures the pathos of an era, the people “forgotten in those unforgettable years”

This book is great. Definitely feeling Russian, it’s making me think of some Chekhov and Tolstoy short stories I’ve read — and Dostoevsky — meets Stalingrad.

“War and Peace” but 20th century is what I heard going in. Grossman is a really good writer.