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. The book relates the psychological and personal tragedy of the Chernobyl accident, and explores the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster ( Russian: Чернобыльская молитва, romanized: Chernobylskaya molitva, lit.

What kept me going was the strength of her love for her husband, and the child she was carrying; the baby seemed to absorb the radiation meant for her as it was born dead. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Chernobyl is often remembered as a Russian incident, but 70% of the radioactivity fell upon Belarus, causing everything from the long-term poisoning of a quarter of the country’s farmland to an 64-fold increase in the rate of cancer.There is a depth and intensity to the suffering of those people affected by the Chernobyl disaster which Svetlana Alexievich has succeeded in capturing through her interviews. The description of his death from radiation poisoning – two weeks of increasing agony – was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed. 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). The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. Note: I took the photos in this post myself, while visiting the Chernobyl site in the summer of 2018.

Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. It isn't an easy read, but it feels like 'eavesdropping' on a conversation we in the West were never meant to hear.This masterly new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains the nerve and pulse of the Russian, conveying the angst and confusion of the narrators -- Serguei Alex. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) , Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). But Svetlana Alexievich doesn’t intrude with facts and analysis—she lets Lyudmila Ignatenko give the full, uninterrupted account of her husband’s slow and painful death from radiation poisoning.

Many of the over 500 interviewees were scientists or engineers who give clear, thoughtful, insightful explanations of what went wrong and why so many of the mitigation efforts were futile. The men were oblivious to their lack of protection, which even if it had been available would not have saved them. She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time. People muse about mortality and time, quote Tolstoy and Andreyev, wonder about remembering and forgetting, and much more. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Undoubtedly, he saved lives, but so many lives were lost and the effects are certainly still affecting so many people today. But most of the book is made up of accounts from civilians who recount their thoughts and feelings as it seemed like the world was coming to and end around them. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction. Chernobyl Prayer, first published in 1997 and then revised in 2013, is part of a project collectively entitled, with some irony, “Voices from Utopia”, which Alexievich has been working on since 1985. Not once do you forget that these are real people who experienced a physical and psychological upheaval unlike anything most of us can imagine.