osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: svetlana alexievich

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“...they, too, are in love with what happened to them, because it is not only war, but also their youth. Their first love.”

Svetlana Aleksievich makes this comment near the beginning of The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, and I’ve chewed over it for a long time because left to my own devices I would not have gotten that out of the interviews that make up the backbone of this book. Maybe because I tend to think of “first love” through a romantic haze, as a positive force? When of course a first love can be destructive, albeit not often as brutally destructive as the Eastern Front of World War II.

Maybe “in love with” here means “obsessed with,” which is certainly true. Many of the women Aleksievich interviewed comment that to a great extent they still live in the war, that their memories feel more real than current reality - they can’t stand anything red because it reminds them of blood, they can’t cut up a chicken because it looks too much like human flesh. (One of them comments “maybe I should have had psychotherapy,” but that clearly was just not available at all.)

The story that haunts me is the partisan who was tortured by the Nazis, managed to escape back home, and then could only be soothed by her mother’s presence; she screamed and screamed in agony whenever her mother had to step away to, say, make dinner for the family. Most of the stories aren’t so severe in their outward manifestations, but just the unending agony…

After The Unwomanly Face of War I needed something lighter, and therefore fell on Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, a romance between a man who has become a woodland spirit and a Victorian folklorist. Great forest atmosphere, but I wanted a deeper connection between Tobias and Henry Silver.

What I’m Reading Now

Last Wednesday, I wrote that I wanted to finish Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Elizabeth Seeger’s The Pageant of Chinese History, and Mary Renault’s North Face before my vacation begins November 1... and then neglected all three books disgracefully all week. I really ought to prioritize North Face, as it’s an interlibrary loan, but a female English tutor has just started flirting with a man with the coy observation, “We must admit the masterpieces are all by men,” and… must we? Even the Greeks acknowledged the genius of Sappho!

We’re entering the home stretch on Dracula! There are two action-packed weeks left to go, and I for one am I tenterhooks. Will they defeat the Count and save Mina? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

What I Plan to Read Next

I will be traveling from November 1 - 10, so this is entirely up for grabs. Could be a little! Could be a lot! Who can say?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. At some point I’ll read The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, but first I need some emotional recovery time. (She also has a book called Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II. Had I known it existed, I could have used the material to make Gennady’s childhood even more heartbreaking, so possibly it’s just as well for everyone that I didn’t.)

I also got back in the saddle with Newbery Honor books with Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady!, which I thought was going to be a story about a misunderstood zany neighbor, but in fact turned out to be a story about junior high student Veronon’s wildly alcoholic neighbor, Maxine. Maxine tries to control her drinking in order to care for her disabled son Ronald, whom she loves deeply, but neither her love for her son nor the support of her neighbors (one of whom takes Ronald in for two weeks while Maxine is in jail on drunk and disorderly charges) are enough. In the end, she sends Ronald away to live with a kindly aunt and uncle.

It’s a well-written and well-observed book, but bleak - bleak - bleak; the tragedy of watching someone try as hard as they can, and fail.

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation is an argument against American Evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual purity: purity rings and pledges not to even kiss until one’s wedding day and so on and so forth. Eh, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly new here, and also nothing that seems likely to convince a reader who isn’t already on board with the book’s basic message.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on keeping on with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Another quote:

What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions.

Food for thought in a time when many of us (myself very much included) would like nothing more than for the course of history to be made smooth.

What I Plan to Read Next

DID YOU KNOW that there’s a new American Girl? She is a 1980s girl and I suspect her books are horrible because all the books have been horrible since American Girl got too cheap to pay for illustrations… but I’ll probably read them anyway because I have an American Girl problem.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Gerald Durrell’s The Drunken Forest, about his collecting trip in South America which was cut unfortunately short by a revolution in Paraguay. Durrell seems to be one of those people who lives more in six months than many people do in their entire lives: he’s just gotten together a good collection when the revolution makes it impossible to get most of his specimens out of the country, so he has to release the animals and leave on a rickety little plane… but within a few days he throws himself into collecting rheas (ostrich-like birds) on the pampas in Argentina. I aspire to react to setbacks with such sangfroid.

I also zoomed through Gale Galligan’s graphic novel adaptation of the Babysitters Club book Logan Likes Mary Anne!, which I don’t think I ever read in novel form. In fact, I’m not sure I ever read any of the first ten or so books in the Babysitters Club series, which is weird because I read so many of the others. Why, younger self??

I don’t know if M. F. K. Fisher herself revised How to Cook a Wolf, or if some later editor got a hold of her marginal notes and then inserted them into the main text, always [closed off with brackets] to show where the edits have been made. This makes for an annoyingly choppy reading experience, especially as the effect of the notes is almost always to diffuse the power of the original passage.

Otherwise I enjoyed the book, but boy do I wish I had a copy with the original unrevised text, or at very least a less disruptive way of adding in the revisions.

And finally, I galloped through Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s A View of the Nile, about the years that she and her family spent in Egypt in the early 60s. The book is a bit slow to get started (I galloped partly because it’s an interlibrary loan with a tight turnaround time), but it hits its stride once Fernea and her husband leave Cairo for Nubia to complete an anthropological study before the Aswan Dam floods all the traditional Nubian villages.

I knew almost nothing about Nubia before reading this book, and Fernea paints such a fascinating picture of the Nubian community where she lives with her husband and two young children that I was left rather sorry that the book didn’t include an epilogue; I would have loved it if the book checked back in to see how the community fared after the Egyptian government transplanted it above the Aswan Dam.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m back in the saddle with Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, although I have to take it slow: too much at once and you drown. The mother of a girl who was badly injured in a terrorist bombing on the Moscow Metro tells Aleksievich, “You’re a writer, you’ll understand what I mean: Words have very little in common with what goes on inside of you.” And yet she keeps talking, and Aleksievich keeps recording: words are insufficient, but they are all we have.

Also, a quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope, her memoir about her husband (the poet Osip Mandelstam)’s arrest and the Stalinist era more generally. She’s musing, here, about a fellow that she thinks might have informed on Mandelstam: “But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m pining away for Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning. I’m first in line on the holds list! Hurry up and read the book, person who has it checked out!!!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As a birthday present to myself I read Elizabeth Wein’s White Eagles, a short novel about a young woman flying with the Polish army at the beginning of World War II. If you know anything about the invasion of Poland, you’ll be able to guess that this has some dark moments, but overall it’s about our heroine flying away from Poland (with a stowaway!) so the grimness-to-adventure ratio ultimately tilts toward adventure.

As a further birthday present to myself (White Eagles is QUITE short), I read Francesca Forrest’s new short story Duplication, which takes place in a world a little slantwise from ours: sometimes people, especially children, will duplicate for a few hours, a day or two at most, so that there are two of the same person running around for a while till they merge back into one.

The story is concerned with the everyday experience of a mother whose daughter suddenly becomes two daughters, and the philosophical question - although with a certain lived urgency that philosophical questions often lack - of what it means for one person to become two. To what extent are the duplicates two separate entities? What does it mean - what is lost - what the duplicates merge back into one?

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I read because I enjoyed the miniseries adaptation so much. (Well, enjoyed seems like the wrong word for such a bleak story, but you know what I mean.) It turns out that the adaptation was extraordinarily faithful, to the point that Grace tells her story in the exact words she uses in the book (I often had the eerie sense of hearing the words in the actress’s voice as I read), which, well, if you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s words at your disposal, why wouldn’t you?

The main difference is that the book includes a subplot in which Dr. Jordan, the doctor interviewing Grace Marks to try to prove her innocence, becomes sexually entangled with his landlady. In general I found Dr. Jordan’s POV unpleasant to read: he has such an instrumental view of people, always with an eye for how they can be of service to him (sexually, for women, and in his career, for men), and few signs of actual affection for anyone. Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished part one of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

Thus, I’m treating myself to Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha. Following series order, I should have read Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, but the ebook was checked out and I figured, “There’s not super a lot of continuity in this series, it will be fine if I skip it for now!”

Reader, it turns out that Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha builds heavily on Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. So I’m kicking myself, although honestly it doesn’t matter all that much: the books are clearly interrelated, but not so much that I’m finding anything in Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha hard to follow. Anyway one doesn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books expecting surprises, but because it’s such a pleasure to spend time with Mrs. Pollifax and whoever she has befriended in the course of this book’s spying mission.

A quote I noted down, as exemplary of Mrs. Pollifax’s character: “Mrs. Pollifax measured intelligence by curiosity, rueing people who never asked questions, never asked why, or what happened next or how.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I intend to continue my Margaret Atwood journey with The Penelopiad, but before that, I really MUST attend to this stack of library books that has been moldering patiently on my bookshelf. (I’ve been clinging to them in the superstitious sense that we might go back on lockdown at any time, but I am coming to the conclusion that this would be MUCH too sensible for the government to ever actually do it.) First up: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally finished Donna Tartt’s The Little Stranger! But my thoughts upon it grew very long, so I’ve separated them out to be their own post.

Marian Hurd McNeely’s The Jumping-Off Place is a Newbery Honor book from 1930, about four children, recently orphaned by the death of their uncle, who fulfill their uncle’s dying wish by heading out to Dakota to settle a homestead that he had meant to claim before he was felled by a stroke. The book’s portrayal of grief distinguishes it from other homesteading books (this seems to have been its own genre in the 1920s and 30s, if not for longer): although mostly the children are carrying on with life, planting a garden, admiring the beautiful prairie, bemoaning the drought that kills their crops, every once in a while grief sneaks up and catches them, even as the months pass by.

Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, similarly, is a Newbery Honor book from the 2000s, which does what it says on the tin. Only two books left from the 2000s! Which means I’ve hit the books I had no particular desire to read earlier, which makes for somewhat slow going.

What I’m Reading Now

troisoiseaux mentioned Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, a collection of oral histories about the transition from the USSR to post-Soviet Russia, which as you can imagine I was all over like white on rice. So far the keynote of the collection is a sense of disillusionment. Many of the interviewees had high hopes for democracy originally (although some still believed in communism and deplored the whole reform process from start to finish), but now it’s come to nothing but stores stocked with salami no one can afford, which is perhaps worse than stores with no salami in the first place.

Other consistent themes: a sense of shame about the enormous loss of prestige on the international stage (from superpower to third-world country), a sense that the world no longer makes sense - that the fall of the Soviet Union destroyed the structures that gave life meaning. A lot of people comment on the war orientation of communism, that they were raised to die for their country, and now that country has fallen without a war, without a single shot, and they’ve been cast adrift.

I’ve also begun Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan, which has developed into a complicated love quadrangle. Miss Nume is in love with her betrothed. Takashima, who has been sent to the United States to study. After finishing his studies, on the very steamer back to Japan, Takashima falls in love with Cleo, an American coquette… who is on the way to Japan to reunite with her betrothed, Sinclair, who Cleo loves because he is the only man who has ever seemed immune to her charms. And, in fact, aside from that one night when the moonlight drove Sinclair to ask Cleo to marry him, Sinclair remains immune! But he is showing signs of susceptibility to Nume…

Now in a way this seems like an easy knot to untie: just switch fiances! Takashmia + Cleo, Sinclair + Nume! But will a book written in 1899 allow a white American girl to marry a Japanese man? We shall see!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve really got to get a move on Alicia Williams’ Genesis Begins Again if I’m going to get that finished before it’s due back. (Someone’s got a hold on it, so I can’t renew it.) I’ve read all the other 2020 Newbery books, so as soon as I knock this one off I can put up my post about that.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Francesca Forrest’s The Gown of Harmonies is actually a reread - I first read it in 2018 in the anthology It Happened at the Ball - but it seemed like a good time for a light-hearted reread, the story of a blind seamstress who sews the titular gown of harmonies, which harmonizes with the music at the ball.

I love the way that this story engages all the senses - particularly hearing, of course, but also the sense of smell, like this quote, which combines the two (and actually the sense of touch, as well - that inaudible hum): “The inaudible hum of magic was in the air, the scent of it, almost like pepper…”

Obviously I’ve never smelled magic, but I love the idea that it smells like pepper: bright and startling and delicious, and a little bit dangerous, too.

On the not-light-at-all side, I finished Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, which has been an oddly comforting companion to the current disaster? It’s just nice to reflect that, while things aren’t going great for us humans right now, at least this time around we haven’t poisoned the actual ground (not to mention the dogs, the cats, the cabbages, etc…) - the people that Aleksievich interviews mention over and over the strangeness of being told to bulldoze cabbages that looks perfectly healthy, unusually beautiful in fact, but are actually practically pulsing with radiation.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve finally started Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall! Which is actually the second book I’ve read that’s set in an academic reenactment of life in Iron Age Britain. Is this just something that British people do occasionally, like Morris dancing?

Anyway, Voices from Chernobyl took up my Serious Reading brain for this week, so I didn’t make it terribly far in this, but I’ve had it on my stack for so long that I feel pleased to have begun.

What I Plan to Read Next

Who even knows? I’m a will-o-the-wisp in the wind these days.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Marilyn Nelson’s Carver, A Life in Poems, which indeed tells the story of George Washington Carver’s life in poems. This is one of those Newbery books where I feel that the awards committee (and also the publisher) forgot to consider what actual children might make of lines like

“Another lynching. Madness grips the South.
A black man’s hacked-off penis in his mouth,
His broken body torched…”

On a lighter note, I also finished Elizabeth Peters’ The Curse of the Pharaoh. Still kicking myself for not picking up more of the series - indeed, more of any mystery series - while the library was still open. Perfect brain candy for a stressful time.

And I blasted through the last quarter of Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles. About halfway through the book, Colum completes the adventures of the Argonauts, so the rest of the book is just following up on the heroes’ life stories outside of the Argo: the Twelve Labors of Heracles, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason throwing over Medea without whom he would have died a loser who never accomplished anything, etc. etc. (Colum goes for a less-savage version of the Medea story, where Medea merely murders Jason’s new prospective bride Glauce; Medea and Jason have no children for Medea to murder.)

What I’m Reading Now

Therese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul, which I’ve been enjoying as a memoir of her childhood - although we’ve now left her childhood; I’ve just gotten to the part where all but two of the nuns in the convent fall ill with influenza, and Therese, as one of the well ones, is worked practically off her feet… but it’s fine, because “I was able to have the indescribable consolation of receiving Holy Communion every day… Oh! How sweet that was!”

I really don’t think I quite get nineteenth-century Catholicism.

I’m taking Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster a bit at a time, because it’s a grueling read. One image that keeps recurring: again and again people comment on the contrast between the natural beauty of the Exclusion Zone and its deadliness, the gorgeous cabbages that have to be plowed right back under the earth because they’re saturated with radiation.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve still got ten library books left, and I’ve also been casting a thoughtful eye on my unread bookshelf. It seems to me that this might be the perfect time to read a Mary Stewart or two; I’ve always enjoyed her ability to make you feel like you’re really visiting the places she writes about, and now is the perfect time for a literary holiday. I’ve got Airs above the Ground and The Rough Magic, which take place in Vienna and Corfu, respectively.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: svetlana alexievich

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