Grass Soup

Rating:
Summary: sounds depressing but actually uplifting
Review: I would thoroughly recommend this book for anyone interested in how human relations change under extreme conditions. Despite the plain title this book provides a lively and vivid account of the author's experience, describing horrific events with a calm objectivity. Some parts are even blackly humorous. A great book which deserves to be better known.

Rating:
Summary: sounds depressing but actually uplifting
Review: I would thoroughly recommend this book for anyone interested in how human relations change under extreme conditions. Despite the plain title this book provides a lively and vivid account of the author's experience, describing horrific events with a calm objectivity. Some parts are even blackly humorous. A great book which deserves to be better known.

Rating:
Summary: Socialist realism.
Review: The positive hero (an intellectual) has just been released from a re-education camp and can now work on a state farm. It is still a struggle for survival against hunger and bitter cold. People have to cheat, steal or ask a favourite treatment from their superiors.
During his stay he reads Marx' 'Das Kapital' and becomes convinced that his former bourgeois life was a mistake and that the only way to a brilliant future is socialism.
He also falls in love with a young woman, but he has here some competitors.

The final is a real genuflection before the Chinese CP, which he thanks for having given him the possibility to correct his lifestyle. At the end he discovers also that behind their hardboiled skin his 'colleagues' are people with a good heart. The hymn on the proletariat becomes a panegyric and his love a religious passion (no sex before marriage).

The whole story is unconvincing, but it is told in a poetic and sometimes poignant suggestive prose. It shows the human side of the battle for survival.

Still a worth-while read.

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous story of two decades of survival in a labor camp!
Review: This hard to believe story is truely gripping. Probably the most amazing thing that surprised me was when he escaped the labor camp only to find out it was WORSE on the outside of the camp (in China) and he voluntary returned on his own to the camp! Truely a glimpse into the man's soul and what he was capable of withstanding for so awfully long. Very inspiring