Svetlana Alexievich’s remarkable book...is a peerless collection of testimony. The text is well translated by Keith Gessen ... Alexievich has not merely given us a work of documentation but of excavation, of revealed meaning. It is hard to imagine how anyone in the West will read these cantos of loss and not feel a sense of communion, of a shared humanity in the face of this horror ... The stories collected here are not only haunting but illuminating.
A true history of [Russia's] people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of voices, punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humor. Which is more or less the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s technique ... The description...was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed ... This is what pulls you through the book: the iterations of wisdom and bravery from its speakers ... Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so—but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book.
Seen through the eyes of those who lived through it, real-life Chernobyl begins to seem like a nightmare, with feral cats who hunt humans in packs and children born missing fingers—or worse. Grim and grotesque, the stories accrete across the pages like the radionuclides lodged in the bodies of those who survived.
If there's any problem with Voices from Chernobyl it is that it remains steadfastly at the personal and individual level. This is, no doubt, intentional, and on one level very successful ... translator Keith Gessen's four-page preface offers about all the hard facts found in the book, and that isn't many. There's not even a map, to make clear where these places are. And the terminology remains unexplained ... it would have been helpful to understand what the dangerous levels [of radiation] might be, etc. Again: Alexievich presumably means her readers to feel the same uncomprehending frustration at these numbers and terms that those that actually faced the radiation exposure did—but that doesn't make it any less frustrating ... The stories in Voices from Chernobyl are 'fantastic', and their authenticity adds to their weight—yet it's not an entirely satisfactory testament to this catastrophe ... in this selective but opaque presentation (where exact locations and time-frames often aren't clear) Alexievich utilizes neither the advantages of fiction, nor those of fact. These are personal and individual accounts, part of the big picture but not enough to convey anything near it all (as a novel or a fuller documentary would have better been able to). Moving and powerful, Voices from Chernobyl still feels inadequate. But then maybe any book about Chernobyl would.
Alexievich put her own health at risk to gather these invaluable frontline testimonies, which she has transmuted into a haunting and essential work of literature that one can only hope documents a never-to-be-repeated catastrophe.
A chorus of fatalism, stoic bravery and black, black humor is sounded in this haunting oral history ... Alexievich shapes these testimonies into novelistic 'monologues' that convey a vivid portrait of late-Communist malaise, in which bullying party bosses, paranoid propaganda and chaotic mobilizations are resisted with bleak sarcasm...mournful philosophizing...and lots of vodka. The result is an indelible X-ray of the Russian soul.
