The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago comes in three volumes, clocking in at some 1800 pages. For the more faint-hearted there is the abridged version, mercifully under 500 pages. Tackling the three volumes would require more than courage and stamina, but a research team to keep up to date with all the Russian historical events the book refers to. The reader can often feel out of the loop when confronted with so many key events, names, expressions and Soviet jargon, abbreviations etc. Solzhenitsyn admits as much himself in the afterward, noting that the book really should have gone before an editorial committee to whip it into shape and make it more consistent.

As it stands, The Gulag Archipelago is a feverish outpouring, shot through with a type of gallows humour. There are far too many exclamation marks and too much nervous energy. Which is of course fair enough, as Solzhenitsyn suffered terribly under the Soviet gulag system. Here is a wounded man who desperately wants to get the truth out - to his own country, to the world and especially the West's deluded left wing sympathisers who couldn't face what was happening under Stalin. 

Having said that, there is much that is fascinating in Solzhenitsyn's book, although it didn't explain how Stalinism took root, how everyone joined in denouncing each other. A passage that stood out and highlights the bizarre world of Soviet Russian is where Solzhenitsyn describes the anguish of how to bring up children. Do you lie to them and tell them that all the propaganda is truth, so they won't slip up and say the wrong thing about Stalin and Communism. Or do you raise them on the truth - that the whole system is crazy but that they must go along with it - and expose them to the risks that a double life brings? A mere slip of the tongue which could bring soldiers knocking on the door in the middle of the night and grief to the whole family. 

Reading Solzhenitsyn made me want to read more Russian history, especially about Stalin and Lenin. In some ways I wish that's where I'd started. Nonetheless, I'm glad I read The Gulag Archipelago.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Recently I found a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince on the bookshelves at home. I've often wondered about The Little Prince, having seen it many times, but never felt a great impetus to read it. This year, however, my moleskine diary for 2020 has an illustration from The Little Prince on its cover, and this, of all things, finally prompted me to read it.

It's a beautifully strange and surreal little novel. It's a children's book - or so we're told - but it really doesn't fit any kind of genre. A total original. The story begins with an aviator - the narrator of the story - whose plane has downed in the desert. He must fix his plane so he can set off again. Into this hazy, liminal landscape a boy with gold hair appears, the Little Prince. We learn he comes from a tiny planet - no bigger than a room sized asteroid - which features 3 volcanoes. 

The Little Prince has visited six other planets before he arrived on earth, and met their rather eccentric inhabitants. When he finally arrives on earth, he strikes up a series of conversations with the aviator and they discuss, often in a whimsical fashion, what is important in life and what is not. The Little Prince is critical of a too technical understanding of life (adults can only appreciate something if they can number and name it), preferring the use of the senses and an aesthetic approach to understanding his environment. 

Eventually the two must part, which causes the aviator much sorrow. It's a sorrow that fills the reader's heart, too, for this is quite a melancholic book, one filled with the image of a solitary child finding his own way in the universe. 

No wonder The Little Prince is such a classic. It's the sort of book you can easily read in an evening and will leave you feeling how precious and precarious life is, yet its done in such a subtle, surreal way that you feel yourself mysteriously transformed as you read it.