svetlana alexievich secondhand time review

They buried him barefoot.Īlexievich told me, “We live in an environment of banality. They couldn’t get a single pair of shoes to fit him. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth.

The last two days in the hospital-I’d lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on. They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. At the beginning of “Voices from Chernobyl,” published in Russia in 1997, a young woman describes watching her husband, a firefighter, die from radiation poisoning:Īt the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?” I do! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. This is oral history stripped down to segments so raw that it can stretch both credulity and the reader’s tolerance for pain. Her books deal with historical crises-the Second World War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and the collapse of the Soviet Union-through the voices of ordinary individuals.

This year’s literature Nobel is the first to be awarded to a writer who works exclusively with living people. After answering an hour’s worth of questions-most of them about Belarusian and Russian politics-Alexievich had walked for blocks in the cold wind before ducking into the restaurant with a group of friends and publishers. Germans were protesting a trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, and the center of the city was closed to traffic. The waitress nodded respectfully, motioning toward a stack of books on the table to show that she understood. Alexievich is a little over five feet tall and stocky her straight shoulder-length hair is dyed a redder shade of brown than it once was. “She has won the Nobel Prize.” Svetlana Alexievich, the sixty-seven-year-old winner of this year’s prize in literature, was at a table for ten in the front of a noisy restaurant in Berlin, where she held her Nobel press conference, two weekends ago. “Please bring the lady one green tea,” went the request. Illustration by Thomas Fuchs Source: Ulf Andersen / Getty “You have to make people descend into the depths of themselves,” Alexievich says.

Svetlana alexievich secondhand time review