/lit/ - Literature

>>13319430
>No one in the thread seems to have read it enough to write up their opinion

I read the first volume and liked it a lot, and bailed on part two because the ebook for it I had was unreadably low quality.

He (very slowly) walks you through every stage of what your imprisonment in a gulag is like, based on his experience and other accounts he gathered while there/in hiding.

The step by step through makes for a nice pacing, going through:
>Your arrest
>Your transportation to your arraignment
>Your interrogation (and confession)
>Your show trial
>Your transport to your prison
>Your first cell
>Meeting your cellmates

and so on, which really sets a mood and tone and provides a sense of progression in what he's describing despite it being biographical. The guy also is quite the writer, and gets really in the weeds about the Russian penal system at the time, in a way that explains how you end up in a society with show trials, torture, and arresting innocent people out of political convenience.

Here's a screencap of him listing off some of the various forms of torture you could expect to be used on you during your interrogation.