Cancer Ward - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I remember reading a book on studies of Eastern European literature in the 1960s and 70s. It commented on the political restraints writers faced, but made a better point in that Western reaction was to sometimes award these novels with greater reward than their talent merited just because the work came from a tolitarian state and had to will itself to our shores. Solzhenitsyn makes Cancer Ward a perfect example of this. His novel is a multiple story of the happenings and goings of an impoverished Soviet Union hospital. Some characters have political bents and some just have offbeat ones. Their cliches is that they all become interesting on general humane levels. The worst that a serious novel can do is give the audience characters and situations that just tug at their emotions and get them to sympathize. I cared about the characters in the book, but I wanted more detail about the grimness of life. What I got was a grand style sweep that made reading the novel more fun than it should have been. There is even a subplot romance that got me interested in the possibility of an unlikely romance, but it is nothing but a small side bar to the story. Romances like these come when the author is fearful their audience is getting bored. It also happens as comittment to a genre standard. Cancer Ward has elements to appease every kind of reader, but no elements that will challenge them. I only saw moments of sincere realism or detail to life that in the end the finished product wasn't worth the subject or theme.