Fabian's Reviews > The Death of Ivan Ilych

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most ordinary and therefore most terrible..."

This arresting line is a synopsis of what all of this boils down to. More than likely, in my pre-Emo high school years, had I read all 52 grueling pages of "The Death of Ivan Ilych", and truly understood its exquisite prolonged lingering around the very morbid notion of death, it would have been a brick in my fo(und/rm)ation. Sadly, nowadays I am way more bubbly and optimistic than ever, so I had a healthy distance between my idle thoughts and this powerful piece. No matter: this made me meditate on that occurrence that is shared by us all, the ultimate, final destination called death (doesn't matter where you lived, breathed, loved).

The novella is incredibly vivid, simple...just very understandable... relatable. Yes, it seems that an illness so long gives the titular man the right to sum up quickly his days of before, his heights, his passions... it is so realistic that I vouch for this to become an official horror selection in any given anthology!