Chernobyl Prayer: A chilling walk through nuclear disaster struck lives
This book, first published in English in 2oo5, was called Voices from Chernobyl
and it’s fair to say that this title does more justice to the book,
because this is what the book consists of: voices; voices of ordinary
people, the victims of the disasters, their families; husbands, wives,
children, mothers, lovers. However, after Alexievich’s Nobel win, the
book has been reissued this year, in a much more impeccable, pellucid
and approachable translation, as ‘Chernobyl Prayer’.
In the construction of this book, using her natural journalistic
instincts, Alexievich adopted a documentary approach; she conducted
hundreds and hundreds of interviews with the victims and survivors and
weaved them beautifully to form this moving and haunting collection of
monologues.
The book begins with a woman’s account of the days following the
disaster, during which she watches her husband, a firefighter who was
burned and injured during the accident, physically disintegrate and
deteriorate in a hospital bed. The description of her husband’s death
from radiation poisoning, after two horrendous weeks of increasing agony
and festering wounds, was so deeply harrowing and visceral that I
doubted my ability to read on.
However, what compelled me to proceed was the woman’s strength and
her indelible and relentless love for her dying husband and for the
child she was carrying in her womb. In the end, she loses both, her
husband and her child; however, it’s the power of love and bravery that
allows her to live on, and for the reader to read on, an iridescent
sense of redemption lingering around the murky corners of tragedy, of
loss.
Data: 05.06.2016
Fonte: www.blogs.tribune.com.pk
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