(no subject)

[skygiants]

Last week I was on vacation at Beth's family cottage, which normally would mean that I'd be reading a battered paperback. HOWEVER instead I was racing to finish Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets due to the unfortunate fact of it being triply overdue at the library.

A useful and worthwhile book; a compelling and depressing book; not, perhaps, an ideal vacation book, but so it goes. The book is composed of oral histories conducted by Alexievich in the years between 1991 and 2012 with various inhabitants of the Former Soviet Union. Alexievich is particularly interested in suicides, and several of the interviews/chapters circulate around people who knew or were close to people who took their own lives after the fall of communism; several others focus on people who were living in areas of the former Soviet Union where the end of the USSR led immediately to ethnic or nationalistic violence.

Many of the oral histories follow a pattern that goes

a. [recounting of an absolutely horrific personal-infrastructural tragedy or example of human cruelty that happened under Stalin]
b. but at least we had ideals
c. And Now We Have This Fucking Capitalism Instead And It's Not A Good Trade

and many others go

a. under socialism in [location] they said we were all brothers and I believed it
b. and suddenly overnight that changed and I will be forever haunted by the things I've seen since

Alexievich recounts the oral histories more or less as if they're dramatic/poetic monologues -- usually monologues of despair -- removing herself and the circumstances under which they were conducted almost entirely, except for a very occasional and startling interjection to make a point. (One oral history, of the horrific-things-happened-but-we-believed variety, is intermittently interrupted by anekdoty from the interviewee's son; Alexievich comments that no matter what she asked him, he only ever responded with a joke.) Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style. As a literary conceit, it's very effective, but I found myself wishing sometimes that it was a little less literary. It's rare that I read a nonfiction book and want the author to be putting more of themself into the narrative, rather than less, but I wanted to know what questions she was asking. That said, for various reasons, I'm considering buying a copy.

Comments

[coffeeandink]

I started this, thought it was incredibly impressive, and then hit a one-two punch of a graphic rape and an incident of violent antisemitism, and put it down for later, which has not yet come.

[skygiants]

The looming library due date was really useful in pushing me through but also really kind of forced the Onslaught Experience. which, tbh, I think is what's intended. but boy. boy

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I had a very similar reaction to this book. The monologues are so good and so literary and to a certain extent so repetitive, and yet the repetition is to a certain extent necessary to make the point about widespread despair? Like, in any time and any place you could get individuals monologuing about how much life sucks. But the feeling was clearly much more widespread in the former Soviet territories.

I'm still haunted by some of the stories from the places with ethnic violence - the rapid disintegration from everyone more or less getting along, maybe with some undercurrents of tension but still everyone is intermarrying and having festive meals together etc., and then in a very short time people are being shot to death in courtyards (and worse) for being the wrong ethnicity.

[skygiants]

the repetition makes the point really effectively and hauntingly -- and of course this is why I want the questions, why I want to know how she solicited these people, what brought these interviews about. In some cases -- the high-profile suicides, in particular -- it seems clear that she went looking, and wanted to try and understand what brought this about, but what about the rest? I want to understand the patterns. I was struck that the one person who announced herself to be vividly, enthusiastically thriving as a Capitalist in New Russia was someone that she reports as coming across on accident and interviewing by chance on the train.

[zenigotchas]

This sounds beautiful

[skygiants]

It's beautifully crafted, very deliberately difficult to read in many places; I'm not surprised it won a Nobel.

[kore]

That sounds amazing, but really difficult.

[skygiants]

that about sums it up, yeah

[sovay]

Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style.

That is fascinating. It sounds as though it should be performed.

[skygiants]

You're definitely right -- I think you could really easily transform it into a theatrical work, and that said work would be devastating.

[chestnut_pod]

Yeah… Just read Goodbye, Eastern Europe, which I am willing to bet was not as good a book as this one, but did also reinforce the burning sense that nationalism is a great human evil.

[skygiants]

Yeah. I keep turning it around in my head, the unsolvable problem -- to gather up smaller peoples and forcibly incorporate them together into a different larger people is, undeniably, a great evil, and yet the nationalism that rises in resistance to this, the urge to violently differentiate from the others around you, is also undeniably a great evil. The accounts in this book are really concerned with the latter in a way that I think makes it easy to ignore the former, but both are evil and neither is an acceptable solution to the other.

(I'm very curious for your thoughts on Goodbye, Eastern Europe.)

[chestnut_pod]

Not sure if you're in the mood for another one like this, but Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return is, I think, the most beautiful statement of this question, and the most likely statement of its answer, which I've ever read.

"Too much has been made of origins. And so if I reject this notion of origins I have also to reject its mirror, which is the sense of origins used by the powerless to contest power in a society..."

[mirawonderfulstar]

This book is on my own tbr because the title resonated with me when I saw it mentioned elsewhere but I haven't gotten to it yet. This post has moved it further up the list, it sounds fascinating.

[skygiants]

I hope it's a worthwhile experience for you when you do read it!

[movingfinger]

If you still want a copy of this book, I happen to have two and can mail you one. It's the trade paperback. I guess, DM me your mailing address?

[skygiants]

This is a very kind offer that I would very gladly take you up on, thank you!