Review
House of Meetings is a tale of envy, conscience and
ethics set against the harsh backdrop of the gulag period, which has rarely been
novelized by English-speaking writers. It is narrated by a
hard-nosed old man, a survivor of the Gulag, in the form of an extended letter to his
step-daughter as he takes a rather grim cruise north to the labor camp
where he spent the longest ten years of his life, enduring extreme cold,
starvation and gang wars. The time period of the narration is
defined exactly as it is written during the 2004
Beslan
school hostage crisis, which Amis uses to illustrate that the violence and
conflict of Russia's past is still effecting it today.
The narrator is one of life's survivors, he went away when he was 26 and was
closing on 40 when he was released, but he has a knack for finding his feet and
becomes a TV repairman,...
Beyond the Book
A Short History of the Gulag
The Soviet system of forced labor camps known as the Gulag spanned nearly
four decades of Soviet history and affected millions of individuals. GULAG is an
acronym of Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagereian which, depending on the source, translates as "The Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps" or "Main
Camp Administration". The earliest camps were
established in 1919, by 1939 about 1.6 million were incarcerated. Over time, the word "Gulag" has come
to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the
system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms including labor
camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's
camps and transit camps....
