Neighbours in Memory: a book review of Svetlana Alexievich's "Second-Hand Time" (trans. by Bela Shayevich) and "Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future" (trans. by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait)

Publication Year
2016

Type

Magazine Article
Abstract
These voices of utopia, inseparable from the experience of dislocation, are a unique contribution to the literature of testimony. With her cycle Svetlana Alexievich has established herself as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainian and Belarusian who uses the Russian language – the only language in which she is completely fluent – to collect and present, from her own subaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of the traumas inflicted by empire.
Magazine
The Times Literary Supplement
Volume
2016
Issue Number
Nov. 18
Pages
10-12