Voices From Chernobyl – A Review
Some books can find themselves sitting on shelves for years, waiting to be opened and read. Many books end up sitting on shelves and never moving at all, never picked up or read, only jostled about as other books around them are moved. Some books though do eventually get picked up and read, even if they are not exactly enjoyable books. Sometimes, these books are more harrowing than anything else.
Voices from Chernobyl is one such book. Put together by Svetlana Alexievich and translated by Keith Gessen, you can tell from the very start that there is little joy to be had. We get to see the lives of people who did everything from firefighting, to digging up and burying contaminated objects, from confused children unsure what is going on, to grieving wives, broken from having had to watch their loved ones slowly die. We don’t hear the journalist asking questions, instead we listen to various people telling you how they saw things. What I find most interesting is how people just didn’t know what was going on. People didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. Did they have to evacuate? Could they evacuate? What about the workers who went in to clear the debris, to destroy buildings and bury contaminated food and soil. So many people were utterly clueless, even after the initial incident. Many were left in the dark, many were outright lied to.
The most haunting stories tended to come from the women married to those who worked in the zone. Cars would come, take the husbands away and make them work, and by the time they came home, these men became ticking time bombs, ultimately dying to multiple forms of cancer, in slow and agonizing ways. Yet these women stayed by their husbands’ sides, no matter what they went through.
That’s not to say that the men weren’t all fine and dandy. These people were risking their lives to try and stop a catastrophe from getting worse. But none of them understood the danger they were in. Many simply did the job because they were told to, with a heavy emphasis that they would be heroes for doing so. No one truly knew the dangers, but they still went and did the job.
As to how I feel about the book? I don’t want to say I enjoyed it though, it’s a hard read. But I felt better informed about the subject. I got to look deep into the lives of the people caught up in the disaster, not just as it happened, but years and decades afterwards. Really, it’s still an ongoing disaster, a dead zone where no one can live, where families are still suffering. Nature may have reclaimed Chernobyl and its surroundings, but it is still radioactive and will continue to be radioactive for a very long time.
Overall, I do recommend Voices from Chernobyl. It can be somewhat hard to stomach, incredibly depressing. But these are the words of honest people, just trying to keep themselves going. Voices from Chernobyl digs deeper into the soul than any other non-fiction work can even begin to imagine.