Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich5/27/2023 ![]() “Man is crafty only in evil, but he’s so simple and honest in his plain words of love,” says one. This is what pulls you through the book: the iterations of wisdom and bravery from its speakers. What kept me going was the strength of her love for her husband, and the child she was carrying the baby seemed to absorb the radiation meant for her as it was born dead. The description of his death from radiation poisoning – two weeks of increasing agony – was so harrowing that I wondered if I would be able to proceed. ![]() Only the voice of the witness can do the events justice, and, in Chernobyl Prayer, after some useful facts about the explosion and its aftermath (“travelling through the villages, one is struck by the overspill of the cemeteries”), we launch into the testimony of the widow of one of the firefighters called in to deal with the explosion. ![]() The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate. ![]() ![]() On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, exploded and released 50m curies of radiation into the atmosphere, 70% of it falling on Belarus, but with plenty to spare for other countries not even vaguely adjacent. ![]()
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