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Voices from ChernobylAuthor: Svetlana Alexievich Translator: Keith Gessen Russian Literature Series April 2005 253 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Hardcover, 1-56478-401-0 $22.95 Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $18.36—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. Until now, all of the books published in English focused on the facts, names, and data. Voices from Chernobyl presents first-hand accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they lived through. In order to give voice to their experiences, Svetlana Alexievich—a journalist by trade—interviewed hundreds of people who had been affected by the meltdown.
From innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucial document of what happened and how people reacted to it. Alexievich presents these interviews in monologue form, giving readers a harrowing inside view into the minds of the affected people untempered by government spin, accusations, or judgements, leaving the reader with just the lifeshattering pain of living through such an event and its aftermath.
About the Author
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Svetlana Alexievich was born in the Ukraine and studied journalism at the University of Minsk. After graduating, she worked as a journalist and wrote a few short novels and essays. Gradually she has developed her very particular style of creating books from human testimonies on a certain subject that she crafts into monologues applying techniques from fiction writing. In an interview she explained, "This is the way I see and hear the world: through voices, through details of everyday life. This genre—capturing human voices, confessions, testimonies—allows me to use all of my potential, because one has to be at the same time a writer, a journalist, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a priest." Her other books include The War's Unwomanly Face Last Witnesses and Zinky Boys. She has received numerous awards for her writing including a prize from the Swedish PEN institute for "courage and dignity as a writer." |
About the Translator
| Keith Gessen is a novelist, translator, and editor-in-chief of n+1, a twice-yearly magazine of literature, politics, and culture based in New York City. |
Praise
"Alexievich's book, which should be a melancholy experience, is both more and less than that. Her technique is a powerful mixture of eloquence and worlesness, describing incompetence, heroism and grief: from the monologues of her interviewees she creates a history that the reader, at whatever distance from the events, can actually touch."—Julian Evans, Telegraph"Voices from Chernobyl builds to the tragic power of a Greek chorus and it is unlikely that we will soon again read such a chronicle of agony and stupidity, heroism and loss."—Martin Cruz Smith, London Times
"As Haruki Murakami did in Underground . . . Alexievich puts full faith in the power of people's testimony, constructing a narrative from them alone . . . These voices are essential, powerful and brave."—John Freeman
"Alexievich . . . shows the physical, psychological, and spiritual costs of the disaster through a series of monologues that allow the pain, confusion, doubt, and strength of each speaker to be heard. Individually, the tales are gruesomely real . . . Collectively, they pack the punch of a surreal, never-ending nightmare . . . "—Chicago Reader
"While the events of April 1986 cannot be changed, books like this provide an opportunity for readers to understand Chernobyl and what the future may hold for those who survived it."—The Daily Californian
"Grim and grotesque, the stories accrete across the pages like the radionuclides lodged in the bodies of those who survived."—The New York Times