Book Log 2007 #38: The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland

One of the problems with how I do the Book Log is that I tend not to write the book up until I'm going to post. Which, a couple months after the fact, makes it hard to remember specifics about why I did or didn't like a book. Or, in this case, what the book was even about.

Turns out this is about a low-level KGB clerk who decides, after meeting Isaac Babel during the latter's imprisonment, to save one of his stories that is in the KGB archive awaiting destruction. This just adds to the tension that comes with working for the KGB, having politically questionable friends, being a widower whose wife died under still-unsolved circumstances, and a mother who is beginning to suffer the mental ravages of old age. Put all of this in 1939, at the eve of World War II, and you have a book that sounds like it should be pretty gloomy.

And while there is gloom, my impression of the book is that it was hopeful in its own way, nicely paced and, unusually, perhaps too short. I think I would have liked more time with some of the characters, or at least more about the time that's covered in the book. So I liked it, even if I had to jog my memory a bit.