The Desert of the Tartars

I’ve watched the movie and then read the book.

My impression is that the book is more introspective, personal and imaginative, while the movie has more of the class component and is on the real side, which has its own depth that I enjoyed.

The movie is consistently visual. But the book features outstanding stones scene that I appreciated.

Also the book had this effect that movie would not have. It made me to recall some of old memories about conscript military service. It was as remote location as one can get excluding locations considered remote for harsh climate conditions. The place also was with ruins here and there because of earthquakes years before.

I definitely thought about parallels between what I saw people experience and events in the book. One notable thing I’ll mention is that for some number of months before leaving the place everybody started gossiping about some ship being nearby and that the ship will take everybody home any day now. Then after a couple of weeks some new transport appears that will surely do it. What happens is that you stop believing any such news and do not believe until the last moment.

On the last day I looked around to remember things and it is not that I visually recall anything I do not reconstruct. Instead of the building where we lived the memory retrieves the fort from the movie or from the book as I imagined it.