By Vasily Grossman (Trans: Robert and Elizabeth Chandler)
Harvill Secker, £16.99
As a war reporter accompanying the Red Army during its pyrrhic victory over the invading German forces, Vasily Grossman was present at the siege of Stalingrad. He also witnessed the consequences of the Holocaust at Treblinka. What he saw became the source material for his masterpiece Life and Fate, a novel which, in terms of its theme, scope and humanity, is not unreasonable to compare with War and Peace.
Everything Flows, though a quarter the size of Life and Fate, was begun in 1955 - five years before the larger work was finished - and left uncompleted at Grossman's death in 1964. It does not take the form of a conventional novel; the plot established in its opening pages, concerning the return of one Ivan Grigoryevich from the infamous Gulag and his attempts to re-establish himself in civilian life, is more or less abandoned after 60 pages for a digression on the nature of informers.
This in turn gives way to the harrowing portrait of a mother who has been sentenced to hard labour in Siberia for failing to denounce her husband.
