One Day In The life of The Life of Ivan Denisovich By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This Book is the first one I am reading for the Orbis Terrarum challenge.  Basically you read eight different
books from authors who come from eight countries.   I don't think the story itself has to be set in a different
country but the author does. www.dreadlockgirl.com is where this challenge originates so you may want to check out the March and April archives.  Ivan Denisovich Shukov is sentenced to 10 years in the prison
camp that is controlled by the Gulag in  Russia.  Actually he was a P.O.W of the Germans his fellow Russians
encounter them as he was being released .  So they got the false impression that he was spying.  This one day
in his life is in the eighth year of his imprisonment .  The beauty of the author taking one day of his life to tell
this story is that you get to pay attention to the details .  It's in those details you see the cruel and inhumane
way that they live.  The sad part about is the character refers to this day as a "red letter "day ,meaning that
this was actually a great day for him.   I guess it's all about your prespective  what one person would see
as a horrible day ,someone else may not think it's so bad.  The characters were well developed.   The story
starts off slowly but it definitely picks up .The writer has a simple , undiluted , no frills approach to telling this
story . What makes this interesting to me is knowing the author really was sentenced to 10 years in the prison
camp,when the book was released in 1962 Stalin still had those prison camps  in existence and, that the typist of a later manuscript got caught  by the Kgb he hung himself! I was impressed and pleased overall and I am
glad I started my challenge with this book . I gave it 5 out of 5stars