Cancer Ward - Fabulous then, fabulous now!

When I noticed a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward moldering away on one of my book shelves a couple of days ago, I realized that it has been - um, a little while - since I'd broken the cover of a book by one of the former Soviet Union's most incisive critics. Solzhenitsyn only died last year, but in many ways he'd become "yesterday's man;" the USSR is long gone and the human rights excesses of its paranoid regime are relegated to history (only to be replaced by new abuses by Russia's newest megolomaniac, Vladimir Putin).

However, as I dusted off my yellowing copy of Cancer Ward, I wondered whether this example of Solzhenitsyn's writings transends the era in which it was written - the late 1960s. I am delighted to report that it does; while its topics ostensibly concern medical care and oppression, the novel remains as alive today as they did forty years ago. In fact, it may even be a better literary read now because one is able to focus less on the politics and more directly on the characters themselves. Here, we learn about how people cope with death and stress, and how hope can transcend cold reality. Cancer Ward, which deals with the patients, doctors, and nurses who inhabit a hospital, also provides an intriguing perspective on medical bureaucracy and the power relationships between physicians and their wards. This was a subject Solzhenitsyn was well acquainted, having barely survived a bout with cancer in the mid-1950s.

Two thumbs up!