February 23, 2017 Williams Lake, Canada
Today I misplaced Ivan Denisovich.
I read that Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about life in a Stalinist prison camp before 2000, when I began writing about books I read. The only Solzhenitsyn I wrote about is The Gulag Archipelago, which I read in 2010. That larger novel, about many prison camps, was not at the local used book sale in the mall, where I freed Ivan from a backroom box today, only to misplace him.
Perhaps I should blame my being sick, not sick as in Cancer Ward, whose inmates suffer from counterrevolution, not congestion. I have congestion, but I haven't been tested for counterrevolution.
That third Solzhenitsyn novel I remember reading is not in the book sale, making losing it there impossible.
The 1965 film version of Doctor Zhivago says, near the end, that Lara's name could have been on a list that got misplaced. Such things happened in those days. I misplaced the Ivan book this day.
I volunteered my time at the book sale, as Solzhenitsyn did in a Stalinist camp. I found Ivan, a couple Hemingways, no doubt counterrevolutionary, and various other interesting books imprisoned in back room boxes. I filled and hauled out a couple boxes of such books, but I don't remember where I shelved Ivan for sale.
Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union in the 1970s for the United States, but later criticized his adoptive country more than he had his birth country. Perhaps he would have approved of my effort against the commodification of art, particularly his art. He's dead now. Used book sales send no royalties to authors, alive or dead.
If the book landed among the books about nature, or children, or the mass-market paperbacks, someone not even looking for it might buy it.
"Look, Ed," Sheila might say. "Here's a book about a day in a life. Remember that day the camper broke down and we had to sleep in it on the highway, until your brother Bill drove up with a u-joint the next morning? That was quite a day. Perhaps this Ivan guy had quite a day. He must have had, to need a whole book to describe it."
"Look at this book, Martha, right beside the Stephanie Myers books," Mary might say to her teenage friend at the sale. "This book only covers one day. Myers can put months in a book. Should we buy it. How interesting can a single day be?"
"Ruby, I found the book for you, in with the Danielle Steele books, of all places. It's about a day in man's life. He sounds like a foreigner. You know how those foreigners are. Remember what I told you about the young men working on the cruise ship that Paul and I were on in the Caribbean? Those bucks pack a lot into a day, let me tell you; but I'm married, so I didn't find out. My friend Barbara, though.....Whoa! She walked funny for days. This book might be about some hot foreigner."
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is out of its back room box and displayed for sale, somewhere, in the used book sale. Twice a year, the local Rotary Club sells used books, largely the same books that rotate through the club's collection bins, scattered around this city. The Stalinists rotated people through prison camps. If my sickness-induced ineptitude increased the chances of the sale of just this one book, then I spent my time well.
Ivan might not have gotten along with Hemingway, who would fit better beside Danielle Steele than among real literature.
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