Chernobyl prayer

The abandoned town of Pripyat near Chernobyl,
with its never-used fairground

It's not that I haven't been reading lately because I have, lots! In fact I discovered to my delight that I had smashed this year's TBR challenge after miscalculating how many books I had read. I'm up to over 40 in that challenge alone. Finding time to blog though recently has been tricky. So finally, some info on the latest reads.

Svetlana Alexievich was the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her way of writing is quite unlike anything I have read before. She interviews a wide variety of eye-witnesses to periods in Soviet history, and then tells their story as a series of short monologues, most no more than a few pages long. There is a wonderful sense of immediacy in her style, but the witnesses' memories are also viewed through the prism of the author's reactions to them, so as well as having an honesty and a freshness about their recollections, the language is often astonishingly beautiful, and all the more moving for that.

Alexievich grew up in Belarus. It's now largely forgotten (at least outside the former Soviet Union), but at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, Belarus was worst hit than its neighbour, the Ukraine, on which the nuclear reactor was sited. On April 26th, 1986, there was a series of explosions at the nuclear reactor, a cloud of atomic particles swept away from the site - they would end up all over Northern Europe. I was in N Wales at university at the time, and remember the worries of local farmers over irradiated sheep. North Welsh lamb and beef was off the menu for some time.

For the population nearer the epicentre of the disaster, life was much worse - 1 in 5 of Belarus's population still lives on contaminated land. Families were forced to leave their properties leaving their beloved pets behind, believing that they were going to return shortly. Most could never return, their old homes were simply too dangerous. As with disasters everywhere rescue services were amazing - young men and women volunteered to go to the disaster zone to help in any way they could. It's largely thanks to the courage of the clean-up workers that Chernobyl was not a more serious disaster than it was. A serious lack of care on the part of the state meant that many of these heroes died horribly in the months and years that followed the explosion.

What happened at Chernobyl was a fundamental link in the chain of events that brought down the Soviet Union, and its impact continues to be felt today, though is little understood or appreciated outside Belarus and Kiev. Many of Alexievich's schoolfriends died from the effects of Chernobyl, and her account of life post-Chernobyl is an unforgettable encounter with what often feels like a different world.

She is without doubt one of the best non-fiction writers I have ever read.

Extracts from Chernobyl Prayer

"We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . .

At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran over there‚ but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: “The ambulances are radioactive‚ stay away!” I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. “Get me inside!” “I can’t. He’s bad. They all are.” I held onto her. “Just to see him!” “All right‚” she said. “Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes."

I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes...I was pregnant, but how could I leave him?”

Lyudmilla Ignatenko, wife of a deceased fireman. Their baby, Natasha, died soon after birth from the effects of radiation poisoning.

"There’s this abandoned house. It’s closed. There’s a cat on the windowsill. I think: Must be a clay cat. I come over, and it’s a real cat. He ate all the flowers in the house. Geraniums. How’d he get in? Or did they leave him there?

There’s a note on the door - Dear kind person, please don’t look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don’t trash the place. We’ll be back. 

I saw signs on other houses in different colors:- Dear house, forgive us! People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they’d written: We’re leaving in the morning, We’re leaving at night and they’d put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper "Don’t beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything." And then in a child’s handwriting: "Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good cat.""

....

"We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore."

Chernobyl clean-up workers.