“This is not a book on Chernobyl,” writes Svetlana Alexievich, “but on
the world of Chernobyl.” It is not about what happened on 26 April 1986,
when a nuclear reactor exploded near the border between Ukraine and
Belarus. It is about an epoch that will last, like the radioactive
material inside the reactor’s leaking ruin, for tens of thousands of
years. Alexievich writes that, before the accident, “War was the
yardstick of horror”, but at Chernobyl “the history of disasters
began”.
Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year for her
powerful works of oral history, was born in Ukraine and grew up in
Belarus. The explosion took place close to her home ground. At once,
people began to ask her whether she was writing about it. Others rushed
out books of reportage or polemic. She hesitated. What had happened was
uncanny, beyond words. There was, she writes, “a moment of muteness”.
Gradually, over many years, she interviewed people whose lives had been
affected by the blast. Many have since died. Her book – first published
in Russian in 1997 and now issued in a new translation of a revised
text – is made up of their testimonies. Her own voice is heard only
briefly. Even the prefatory summary of events is a patchwork of extracts
from news reports.
It is a moving piece of polyphony, skilfully assembled from what must
have been a huge mass of material. Characters unselfconsciously reveal
themselves. Stories are told with urgent anger, or ramblingly, full
of puzzling gaps. A world emerges piecemeal, a strange one in which the
most lethal products of modern science coexist with an apparently
timeless peasant culture.
Alexievich’s interlocutors include fire-fighters and “clean-up
workers”, those thousands of conscripts and volunteers ordered into the
contaminated zone to contain the damage, many of whom died soon and
horribly. She listens to the former inhabitants of the hundreds of
evacuated villages. She listens to teachers and children, to sorcerers
and scientists. She listens to those who rail against the idiocies of
officialdom. She listens to officials.
Data: 16.04.2016
Fonte: www.newstatesman.com
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