Mike’s Reviews > Kolyma Tales > Status Update

I think this book is a fair bit longer than it needed to be.

The tone of this book is a bit weird, but very interesting. I'm not sure if I like how un-narrative and at times even hard to follow it is. But at the same time, I do appreciate the scope.

The episodic nature makes it really easy to get lost in this book and then not remember anything about it at all.

This isn't actually as depressing as I was anticipating from the first couple of sections. There's actually a lot going on here, much of it very interesting regarding how suffering affects people and how little bits of joy can still be found, in a way that's much less cheesy than that description implies.

This really makes me think about what the value is of documenting suffering, the extent to which I can gain anything from reading it and the extent to which Shlamov gained anything from writing it. I say that because... Jesus, we really are in for 500 pages of this, aren't we.