A day in the life

I am so grateful for the suggestion to read this. I found it profoundly moving, illuminating and horrifying. It was a privilege to read it, but I would never have thought of it for myself. A perfect reading group choice, in other words! His language was so precise, it captured so many nuances and shades of grey in what I would otherwise have assumed was an unbearably dark situation. Which of course it was, but some people did, astonishingly, survive or even cope well and this indicated how. Hard to imagine the shock this must have caused when it came out.

My only reservation is that the author very wisely chose a firmly delineated canvas, and (presumably) decided to write of a moderately successful day for his protagonist to avoid unendurable bleakness for the reader. All of which I'm very glad of. But somehow I felt I perhaps came away feeling a little too positive at the end. What do the rest of you think? Did he get the balance right?