From Kate's shelf: Voices from Chernobyl

I bought Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich back when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it 2015. I was intrigued. And if she won the Nobel, it had to be good right? 

For those of you who don't know Alexievich and aren't a Nobel Prize nerd like me, in this work, she crafts a unique and striking narrative style as she collects interviews with people who were touched by the disaster of Chernobyl. When she won the Nobel the committee stated that she had won it “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

It is an accurate description of the work.

Here are some of my thoughts:

This is not a book you binge your way through in a long weekend. This is a book that requires - no demands - that you take it all in. Word by word. Piece by piece. Horror by real life horror. The way she is able to capture the emotion and the personal history in each interview is unparalleled. 

I think we all know what happened at Chernobyl from an intellectual standpoint, but I was blissfully unaware of some of the events that transpired as the Russians tried to cope with the reactor.

The men that were sent without protection to clean radioactive material off the roof of the crippled reactor. The pilots who made trip after trip over the site to collect readings. The food that was still harvested and still put into the food supply... quietly... The people that returned. The wives and sisters and mothers that received them at home. The children who went to school with piles of radioactive dust on their roofs. 

It is an incredibly human story and yet somehow otherworldly. Page after page, I kept finding myself in a state of disbelief. How could this happen? How did they think this was okay? How could they not see that none of this was alright? And then, Alexievich would show you the answers... and then a part of me suddenly understood.

This disaster is one of the great lesson of life. We make the best decisions we can in the moment that we make them and have to find a way to live with the outcome. 

I highly recommend the read. There are sections that will be hard to stomach, but 
every word will be worth your time. Alexievich is a master of her craft and deserves every word of praise spoke about this work. It was courageous to collect. I cannot even imagine what it took for her to gather all those interviews and put their emotions before her onto the page. The weight she carried for them is immense. 

She has done history a great service. She has given the men and women who have died or are dying as a result of this tragedy a voice. She has given them a place and, hopefully, helped ensure that we will never forget the cost of the folly of man. 

- Kate