This is one of those novels that is barely a novel - at least, that's the impression that I get of it. The author is drawing from his own experiences of years in a labour camp, and it's hard not to read One Day in the Life and wonder just how little was changed, and how much of this actually happened. Are the characters taken from individual life, or are they amalgams of men that Solzhenitsyn met over and over again, and clotted into character? I don't suppose it matters. The real sense of verisimilitude here lies in the small things... hiding a trowel, warming one's foot rags, the lingering resentment at not ever receiving a parcel from family, despite telling them not to send one and to feed the children left fatherless at home instead. How used a person can get to rotten fish in soup, how valuable the oats are that were once fed to horses. It's a grim, miserable portrait not just of a prison system gone wrong - so wrong it's incomprehensible - but of how used a person can get to that system, how they carve survival out of routine, how they find happiness in bricklaying. 

This is a very fine book, but it's a portrait of such waste.