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Chernobyl Prayer: Svetlana Alexievich’s Heart-Breaking Oral History

Monday, May 13, 2019 5:03

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When I visited Belarus last year, I thought I’d read some Belarusian literature, and what better writer to start with than Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Alexievich’s Nobel win was unexpected because her books are non-fiction, a kind of oral history (although as this New Republic article points out, she takes considerable liberties with the testimonies she collects). After reading Chernobyl Prayer, though, I can see exactly why she won. I don’t think I’ve ever come away from a single book with such a comprehensive understanding of a historical moment, as seen through the eyes of the people who experienced it.

The writer relegates her own voice to the margins of this book. There’s some historical background at the beginning, a brief epilogue at the end, and a single chapter called “The author interviews herself on missing history and why Chernobyl calls our view of the world into question.” In this chapter, Svetlana Alexievich makes it clear that this is not a book about the details of what happened at Chernobyl, why the reactor failed, who was to blame, etc. Instead, she writes:

“What I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our story on earth and in time. I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul.”

The remarkable thing about Chernobyl Prayer is that Alexievich does achieve all of this. The bulk of the book is given over to monologues (and occasionally choruses) by people who lived near Chernobyl, worked on the cleanup, saw loved ones die from radiation, etc. Some are experts like atomic scientists, doctors, politicians and engineers, but most are ordinary people who got caught up in the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine and the subsequent spread of radiation which, because of the wind direction, spread mostly across Belarus (23% of Belarus’s land is contaminated, the cancer rate has risen 74-fold, and only one person in 14 dies of old age).

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.

Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2019/05/chernobyl-prayer-svetlana-alexievich/

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