Cancer Ward

"A man dies from a tumor, so how can a country survive with growths like labor camps and exiles?"

"An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus eyes… just like that…”

Out of his own experience, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, wrote a great novel one character (or the main protagonist) of which, I learned from parallel readings, had a past similar to his.

In third person, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward narrates the story of a group of patients suffering from different types of cancers and of the hospital staff (doctors, nurses and orderlies) in the cancer ward of a hospital in Uzbekistan in the 1950s. I started reading the book without much knowledge of Russia’s nightmarish past under Stalin’s regime; so, up to the first 15-20% of this “fat and heavy” book – 570 pages: the thickest that I’ve ever read, so far – I had to read it while regarding the work only as a closer look to these patients, some with diseases that had been diagnosed terminal. I found every single page dense with the author’s mastery of creating the assembly of words that would make the reader know, feel and understand what the characters, particularly the patients, have been and are going through. The author didn’t use long descriptive expositions. His sentences are simple and uncomplicated yet carefully constructed so that the assemblage of such simple sentences has produced lasting images, be these of hope, or of hopelessness, or of grief, or of pain, or of remorse, or of guilt or the absence of it, or of resignation. Each page is alive. At the point when I got know the main protagonist and some of the other characters well, I had to stop reading from time to time and did some (parallel) reading on Russia under Stalin. I did an episodic reading of the rest of Cancer Ward without haste lest I would lose the opportunity of savoring the genius of the novel. In between, actually, I managed to finish three other books – The Successor (Ismail Kadare), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) and Slaughterhouse Five(Kurt Vonnegut).

Having had “googled” on related literature on Stalin’s Russia and Solzhenitsyn’s life and works, I would agree with others’ view of the cancer ward in the novel as a microcosm of the whole Russian society under Stalin, with characters who can be thought to be either representatives or personification of the Communist Party, Gulag prisoners, overworked medical staff and common people.

Although I spent almost a month reading this book, it’s still worth my time. There are so many memorable scenes but the scene at the zoo, I think, is the most lingering. It has been written effectively and beautifully. I could feel what the character felt as he moved from one cage to another cage of the animals in captivity.

I am highly recommending this to anyone who has patience and time to read voluminous yet good books.

{May 8, 2009}