Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A loss whose greatest element was imposed on the children, youngsters who came to experience illnesses and painful death, one worsened by being torn from all they knew by forces beyond their understanding to experience sickness they were not responsible for. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). I thought I recognized the image in your header from the abandoned amusement park in Pripyat, so I was immediately interested in the story you were about to tell, but it’s even more interesting to learn that you took the pictures and toured the area yourself. The cancers induced by exposure to high levels of radiation brought Valentina, whose intense love for her husband was laid bare, to face day by day the death of her husband and with her own happiness.

Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. Alexievich interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists, and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. This book gives a voice to the anger, pain, and heartbreak, but it is seldom an easy voice to listen to, because it forces the reader to confront how little they really know about what will one day be remembered among the most significant events of the 20th century.Alexievich's documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so - but it's a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.

At which point, when you consider the extent to which she has been traversing the irradiated landscape, you realise she has put herself on the line in a way very few authors ever do. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. There are insights, too, from atomic scientists who begged the authorities to evacuate people and from a former official who explains the institutional reasons for their inertia.A beautifully written book, it's been years since I had to look away from a page because it was just too heart-breaking to go on. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The real Chernobyl: HBO's hit miniseries is ending, and here's how its characters compare to their real-life counterparts". The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate.

The authorial presence is invisible, except when she interviews herself on the significance of the disaster: “We cannot go on believing, like characters in a Chekhov play, that in a hundred years’ time mankind will be thriving,” she says, adding, “What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. Some of the numbers are just too shocking to get your head around, but the whole time I was reading this book I had one thought: how did I not know it was this bad? 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. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.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.

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. I would not describe myself as an emotional person, and I seldom find myself overwhelmed by anyone else’s feelings, but Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future (or Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, as it is also published) makes for heavy reading.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. Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please. In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages. The HBO television miniseries Chernobyl often relies on the memories of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book.