Writing is sui generis, blending the force of fact with the capaciousness of fiction to create a new, vitalliterary compound. "The""Washington Post"Īn enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism fall, gives a staggeringly deep and plural picture of a people that has lost its place in history. makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony. Alexievich stations herself at a crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. is one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts of society caught in the throes of change that anyone has yet attempted.
" A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful. Stylistically, "Secondhand Time," like her other books, produces a mosaic of overlapping voices deepened by extraordinary stories of love and perseverance. "The Christian Science Monitor"Īlexievich s masterpiece not only for what it says about the fall of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of Russia and its former satellites. This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today s dictatorships, that matters.
She shows us from these conversations, many of them coming at the confessional kitchen table of Russian apartments, that it s powerful simply to be allowed to tell one s own story. Alexievich s witnesses are those who haven t had a say. There s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as"Secondhand Time"since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn s"The Gulag Archipelago, "nothing as necessary and overdue. " The most ambitious Russian literary work of art of the century. A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens. Alexievich s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, "Secondhand Time"is comparable to"War and Peace." "The Wall Street Journal"Īlready hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, "Secondhand Time"is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. Like the greatest works of fiction, "Secondhand Time"is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and "Secondhand Time
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