Reading the World - Revisited Book Review - 3

The following review of Voices from Chernobyl was done by the EWN last year. This title is the first to be a two timer on the Reading the World suggestion list as last year the hardcover was suggested and this year, Picador has recently published the paperback version and listed it again.

Voices from Chernoby by Svetlana Alexievich translated by Keith Gessen

April 26, 1986.  That’s the day that there was an explosion and the nuclear fire began at the Chernobyl Power Plant.  A decade later, journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed people of all types that were affected by that explosion.  Taking their oral histories and putting them together in an order that bounces back and forth between people astonished by what they can recall, and people that are astonished anyone would care to recall, Alexievich has put together a book that is nearly impossible to put down.  Not to mention as scary as anything King or Barker have ever thought of.  Scarier actually – this really happened.

The opening oral history is from Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of deceased firefighter Vasily Ignatenko.  His crew was the one on duty the night of the explosion.  They were summoned and went and fought the fire.  The nuclear fire.  Within minutes of the explosion occurring.  After fighting as long as they were able, the entire crew was whisked off to Moscow, to a hospital that specialized in radiation issues.  The hospital itself had just come out of a quarantine of sorts and so was nearly empty.

Lyudmilla is nearly the perfect person for Alexievich to speak to – the only wife of a fireman to gain access into this hospital.  The doctors there did not realize that she was hiding her pregnancy of six months.  Inside, Lyudmilla witnessed the absolutely devastating decay of her husband’s body, as well as the other firemen, over a 14 day period.  Within days, the burning that occurred inside of Vasily’s body had begun working it’s way towards the surface.  By the tenth day, his internal organs were disintegrating and coming up through his mouth in small pieces (which Lyudmilla would clear out by putting a rag over her hand and swabbing through).  At the end he was producing stool 25 to 30 times per day.  Less than a month after Vasily passed, Lyudmilla gave birth to their daughter, Natashenka.  She was born with cirrhosis of the liver.  She also had congenital heart disease.  She died four hours after birth.

This first history takes up nineteen pages and as riveting as it was, I was glad to move to the next section –had all 240 pages been that descriptively brutal, I don’t think I would have made it through the book.  But Alexievich has a very good sense of pacing and distribution of types of oral histories. 

She only allows a couple as graphic as the above to sneak it, but includes many from people who realized just how bad the situation was but didn’t witness it from as close as Lyudmilla did.  Other histories come from liquidators, those that were in the Zone (up to 30 kilometers from the reactor itself) cleaning up;  Belarusians that had lived in the Zone prior to the explosion;  those who returned to the Zone once the government deemed it okay again;  and hunters rounded up specifically to go in and kill all of the pets that had been left behind when the area was evacuated.

By allowing the different individuals to speak their own mind, though it does seem pretty clear that Alexievich has tightened up their words, she allows the reader to see the story from all sides, and not from one developed viewpoint just touching on the other sides.  There are histories representing people who don’t believe anything dangerous happened.  There are histories from those that know how horrible it was, but just wanted to be left in their homes.  Stories from those who felt they had no home after the Soviet Union collapsed and stumbled through civil wars were appalling – throwing a newborn (alive for less than an hour) through a window to its death because the mother wouldn’t reveal whether it was a Kulyab Tajik or Pumar Tajik. 

What becomes apparent is that while the government refused to let the world, and really its own people, know just how bad things were, it certainly wasn’t from lack of effort that the spreading of radiation continued.  They through thousands of men at the reactor and the Zone.  They buried parts of the reactor that they cleaned;  they buried houses;  they buried the pets they killed;  they even buried the land.  The plan was ladened with incompetence however.  While these men did this, leading to their own deaths, looters came and took things from the houses back out of the Zone.  Cows were allowed to leave and be sold as food, and milk suppliers.  Food grown there was exported.  Even more frightening is the conclusion that the cover placed over the reactor isn’t going to last.  There are fissures in the reactor and radiation leaking through daily as it is.  Though this has been known since 1996 at least, it doesn’t appear that there is any plan on fixing the cover, nor being ready to react to its collapse.

Alexievich has paid for the job she did with this book – she now has an immune deficiency syndrome.  However, she has put together a book everybody should read, and Keith Gessen has done a great job of taking her words and laying them out in English in a manner that reads just as she planned – like monologues from people she searched down and talked to.

5 stars

Comments

[Tusaargusly]

great post

[Alikasqw]

Каждый из Вас в силах помочь детям!
Each of you to help with forces to children!
Jede von Ihnen in den Kraften, den Kindern zu helfen!
Chacun de vous dans les forces a aider les enfants!
Cada uno Ud en las fuerzas ayudar a los ninos!

www.alikas74.narod.ru

[Max]

I totally agree with you