It’s no surprise to find alcoholism, brutality and suicide featuring prominently in accounts of the former-Soviet Union. The result is an extraordinary work of non-fiction which is composed of the types of stories that usually go untold amid the march of time and change. interviews ordinary citizens and shapes their testimonies into coherent narratives. Alexievich creates a group portrait of traumatized people desperately in need of an opportunity to heal-and, tragically, not likely to get it. Beautiful tales of love and resilience dramatically pierce the darkness, but on the whole Ms. The most disturbing aspect of Secondhand Time is bearing witness to how people’s humanity crumbles under pressure to survive. The book is easy to read, but not an easy read. She is the least self-conscious and least self-indulgent writer I’ve ever encountered. Their asides and unexpected confessions are especially powerful. They bang their fists on tables, describe dreams, plead and argue.

Her sources joke, philosophize, weep, digress and complain. Alexievich’s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace.

Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition-or, as the Russian in me is tempted to put it, of the human soul. While the book is an excellent guide to a vanishing culture, it transcends ethnography.

Alexievich’s 470-page oral history of the Soviet people, heartbreak will become second nature. Read Full Review >īy the time you’re finished with Ms. The most ancient grievances are churned up.So are the freshest longings. Secondhand Time is an avalanche of engrossing talk. This book is dense on a macro level, but one sometimes misses the sentence-by-sentence density of the best fiction. The interviews were collected over many years, but dates are rarely supplied. This book can leave you lost in time, as well.

But the stories.can also be baggy and repetitive. In this lucid translation by Bela Shayevich, she gets these details onto the page. This book is thick with longing for old times, terrible though they might have been. When she does insert a comment, it’s in brackets and often unbearably moving, like 'She no longer wipes her tears' or 'She’s practically screaming' or 'And both of us cry.' A freight of catharsis is on display. There are few interpolations from the author. It offers a flood of voices: doctors and writers, deli workers and former Kremlin apparatchiks, soldiers and waitresses. You can open this document anywhere it’s a kind of enormous radio.

Secondhand time book