This book left me conflicted. On the one hand it clearly shows the strain that camp life put upon Osadchy, but on the other hand the narrative is so disjointed (and I cannot tell if that is a translation problem or how the book was written) that it is difficult to see a coherent picture. Follow that up with the fact that the narrative is almost stream of consciousness and poetic in nature (neither of which I like) and for me the entirety suffers.

Still the book has merit in that it is one of few that deals with a first person account of the late Soviet arrests in the Ukraine. I just found it difficult to fully grasp. ( )