Unpredictability — both oppressively real and imagined — dominates the pages of War Diary ... By including a photograph of ordinary city scenes with each entry, Belorusets achieves a profound kind of juxtaposition, one that overlays the ordinary with the extraordinary realities of war ... Her entries, written in the cloaked darkness of her apartment, convey not only the mood of a besieged city but also the spirit of its undeterred inhabitants.
Humanizing details pile up ... This book’s self-consciousness, as an art project, saps some of its immediacy. Belorusets’s prose, in this translation by Greg Nissan, lacks depth and grain ... It’s interesting to witness the way Belorusets thinks about the enemy. She despises what’s happening to her country, and she deplores some Russian soldiers who are drunks and louts. But she’s aware that so many of them have been lied to about what they’re doing in Ukraine. She considers compassion and its limits.
An essential document of the Ukrainian people’s experience of the conflict ... no veil of fiction stands between the reader and the nightmare of life under military assault.
Rigorous in its focus on interior life ... Belorusets is the antithesis of the hardened war reporter or the boastful tourist. Her diary is animated by a simple and sincere disbelief that anything as cruel and senseless as war can exist anywhere. At the same time, the book is full of her struggles with herself.
The surreal circumstances Belorusets depicts, both in her writing and in the accompanying color photographs, set against the drama of war, are quietly disturbing. By showing how the war forced people to adapt to create any semblance of normalcy, she creates a compelling portrait of a nation under siege as well as the inspiring resilience of ordinary Ukrainians.
