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To read the novel "House Of Meetings" is to feel crushed. By the abominable reality of the Soviet labour camps under Stalin, where mass murder was committed in slow-motion in the privacy of Siberia. By the imagined plight of the narrator, his status flipped from war hero to traitor, interned by cruelest fate with a half-brother married to the woman they both love (conjugal visits taking place in the building of the title). And by the unparalleled prose of Mr Martin Amis.