Theoretically, I should have loved this book. It was about Stalinist Russia, a subject that I have found more and more interesting lately. And it was about the men (and a few women) who worked under Stalin and carried out the bulk of his dirty work. These are stories that aren’t often told and I’ve always been fascinated about what drives ordinary people to do horrible, cruel things.
Unfortunately, this book was so badly written that I could barely get through it.
I read the first few chapters optimistically, hoping that the book would finally get up to speed and I would be able to get into it. By the end, it was an epic battle of wills. Me versus the book. Only one would be left standing. It was sheer stubbornness that drove me to finish this book. It certainly wasn’t because I was enjoying it.
My primary objections to the book were that a) that the author tended to think that a laundry list of information was just as good as a narrative focus and 2) that you needed to have several PhDs in many different subjects in order to understand half of his references. I should not need google and a dictionary to read a book that’s sold for mass-market consumption. And after the 27th or so paragraph that consisted solely of a long list of names, I was starting to realize that this book held a lot of useless information. It’s almost as if the author didn’t really know what to think about his subject, so he rattled off a bunch of trivia in the hopes that people wouldn’t notice that he had no central theme or thesis.
I felt the same way about this book as I did about The Living and the Dead by Paul Hendrickson. It’s a damn, dirty shame to tell the stories of people whose voices have never really been heard and to then tell that story in a way that renders it nearly incomprehensible. This was not an obscure academic text. This was a book that I bought on amazon.com. And it completely failed to capture my interest or leave me feeling more informed than when I started it.
It’s easy to put aside a novel when it doesn’t stir you. I rarely finish books for the sake of finishing them. This book took real history and rendered it virtually incomprehensible. It’s a real shame. I wholeheartedly wish that someone would take the source material and then make something good out of it.
With better focus, a lot of editing and some central themes to rally around, this would be a great book. As it stands, I give it a solid C-. The idea is there, the facts are definitely there, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
What books have you read that you sincerely wish had been better?
I’m attempting to read Young Stalin, and I can’t quite make it through. I’m drowning in complicated Russian names, and then the author refers to Stalin by his family name, a shortened childhood nickname, his pen name, and his chosen (and well known) name ‘Stalin’ at different times. The List of Characters is four pages long, and there are about a zillion footnotes.
I ended up putting it aside for the fluffy ‘The Queen’s Lady’ instead.