Now the first ambassadors of the devil were already sent to our heartland - spies. 9. Would you recommend this book ? I am reading this book for my junior year English class, and it doesn’t really compare to a lot of other (too fictionals) novels I have read. It is a type of book that one time have begun to read you can’t put it down until you have finished it. The novel shows me how everyone who is uttering Stalin’s name in wrong ways was sent to the labor camps (Read Stalin’s Diary from 1938 and 1941 and find out, how he justifies his crimes ! ) to enter humiliation, freezing cold and extremely hard work. Millions of "zecks" (work camp prisoners) were like Shukhov. They are all looking for a bit privacy and dignity, or probably some smoke. He is trying to make the best of it. Originally I thought this book would be a waste of time, but it turned out that it was very interesting and everyone should read it. In the end the story the author is describing the hours of the days "after they marched to work" (pg. 116). Shukhov "smuggled that bid of hackswa through (and) […] he’d bought that tobacco" (pg. 158). Probably he won’t be an appropriate friend for me, but these are the only spots in the novel, where Chukhov is showing his "funny" respectively human side. And a real friend must show me also his unofficial character, for instance the little "Mephisto" seems to appear from dusk till dawn after his "Faust" rule in the daytime as squad leader. But of course he ought to be a broken after eight years in prison and as an captive of the Germans - he is really also mentally very strong. Shukhov has "strictly forbidden his wife to send him " "parcels", because "he wrote […] Don’t take the food out of the kid’s mouth (and) […] he knew […] that his family wouldn’t be able to keep it up for ten years. […] But […] every time […] someone […] receiv...
