Re-reading Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and am able to clarify for myself what I like about his work. I don't think of it as reading the work of a genius, whatever the blurbs on my edition say. There are many annoying features, such as the sexism and the snobbery, as well as a certain rawness and clumsiness in the narrative. The flaws do not matter, mainly because what counts is the humanity of it all, the richness and honesty of the human description, the ability to make a world for the reader in which you can live. The characters (full of flaws and frailties) become your friends and familiars. You are in a ethos in which weak human beings are valued and accepted, which is not a bad place to be, when you are sixty-one and occasionally prone to looking back.