Steven Godin's Reviews > Chernobyl Prayer

"Sometime in the future, we will understand Chernobyl as a philosophy. Two states divided by barbed wire: one, the zone itself; the other, everywhere else. People have hung white towels on the rotting stakes around the zone, as if they were crucifixes. It's a custom here. People go there as if to a graveyard. A post-technological world. Time has gone backwards. What is buried there is not only their home but a whole epoch. An epoch of faith. In science! In an ideal of social justice! A great empire came apart at the seems, collapsed. First Afghanistan, then Chernobyl. When the empire disintegrated, we were on our own. I hesitate to say it, but...we love Chernobyl. We have come to love it. It is the meaning of our lives, which we have found again, the meaning of our suffering. Like the war. The world heard about us Belarusians after Chernobyl. It was our introduction to Europe"

— Chairwoman, Woman's committee of Children of Chernobyl.



My own memories of April 26 1986 and the Chernobyl catastrophe I remember my parents being glued to the TV on that day. I was nine-years-old at the time, and even though I didn't fully understand what was going on, I knew it was bad; really bad.
Over time, my knowledge of the disaster remained sketchy, picking up bits of information here and there, but it felt to me like the whole event was brushed under the carpet, for the rest of the world to forget, no outside eyes getting on to what really happened in the clean up operation.
Until now, and reading Alexievich's book, the only image that was strong in my mind is of the abandoned bumper cars from the visiting fair, rotting away in a mechanical graveyard.
That's now all changed.

Whatever her genre, Svetlana Alexievich is an original, a true voice, a voice that is hers and hers alone, but it's through the voice of others, the ones the rest of the world never got to here, opening up on their thoughts, living smack bang in the middle of the worse possible nightmare. Exploring pain and loss on an unprecedented scale, the forgotten speak out, making for one of the most upsetting, harrowing and heart-felt books I will ever get to read. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it's no more than a pinprick to the naked eye, this is writing of immense suffering, of death, the soul of mankind rocked to it's core. But it is also filled with a gigantic love, an all powerful love that no amount of radiation could ever destroy, as these people show what big hearts us humans carry around with us. Some of the accounts within, I just couldn't quite believe, that had me seeing red. Surely this is some sort of joke?, how the hell could these things be aloud to happen?, this was 1986, not 1896, the bodies in control (or should that be no control what so ever) should hang their heads in shame!. The amount of deaths and deformities that should never have been allowed to happen makes me sick to the stomach. Some were unavoidable. Most weren't.

A true history of its people need be no more than the howls of despair of millions of souls. Punctuated by moments of incredible tenderness, courage and grim humour. The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own is so unique and so appropriate. Only the voice of the witnesses can do the events justice, and in Chernobyl Prayer, after some shocking facts about the explosion and its immediate aftermath, it's the testimony of those living close by, that grab you around the neck, before dragging you off into their world.

Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so, but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book, and Svetlana Alexievich fully deserved the Nobel Prize for her work: it's that important. A non-fiction masterpiece.