Summary from Goodreads: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.
The Chernobyl disaster is one of those events that loomed over my grade school/middle school current events topics. Radioactive cloud. Meltdown. If you're eight or nine, what do these words even mean? Mostly fear, and this was long before I learned about Three-Mile Island and how close we came in the United States to a similar disaster.
Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, conducted a series of interviews with survivors of Chernobyl and their family members. If I read the dates correctly, these interviews were conducted in the early- to mid-1990s, after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Rather than assemble the information into a traditional history book, Alexievich chose to present it as oral history.
This editorial choice has created a devastating book to read. It would have been a sad and horrifying narrative about a disaster that could have been prevented - and much of the subsequent human suffering and illness alleviated by having infrastructure and information that was actually based on fact and not dogma - just as a conventional work of journalism. However, presenting the transcribed interviews with minimal editing was a choice that presented a gutting and damning work. It will haunt you. Voices from Chernobyl is a must-read for anyone involved in public health, public administration, disaster preparaedness, et cetera.
Summary from Goodreads:
A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author's year-long journey through a book from every country.
Following an impulse to read more internationally, journalist Ann Morgan undertook first to define "the world" and then to find a story from each of 196 nations. Tireless in her quest and assisted by generous, far-flung strangers, Morgan discovered not only a treasury of world literature but also the keys to unlock it. Whether considering the difficulties faced by writers in developing nations, movingly illustrated by Burundian Marie-Thérese Toyi's Weep Not, Refugee; tracing the use of local myths in the fantastically successful Samoan YA series Telesa; delving into questions of censorship and propaganda while sourcing a title from North Korea; or simply getting hold of The Corsair, the first Qatari novel to be translated into English, Morgan illuminates with wit, warmth, and insight how stories are written the world over and how place-geographical, historical, virtual-shapes the books we read and write.
Some time in late-2012 I stumbled across a blog titled A Year of Reading the World. This very nice lady, Ann Morgan, was apparently wrapping up a year-long blog project wherein she read a book from every country in the world. Plus a territory chosen by poll from her readers. 197 books in all.
197 books, one from each country. Translated into English. (2012, for me, was the year I read 192 books, mostly romance novels because my mother was undergoing treatment for cancer and I couldn't handle much else. So Ann's project caught me attention simply for her level of ambition - I have blog projects, but I am absolutely the worst at reading to list or schedule or timetable.) As 2013 rolled in, I backed up to the beginning of Ann's blog and read it all from the beginning. Not only did she find some really interesting books to read she also had a fair amount of trouble getting books to read from more countries than I would have guessed. Ann's experience led me to check and see how much in-translation work I read....which, like my percentage of POC authors, was pretty terrible. And then Ann announced she'd been offered a book deal based on her blog....
https://www.tumblr.com/search/Kermit-flail#
(Full disclosure: once I found out that Norton's Liveright imprint was going to publish the US edition I begged a galley off them. I have no regrets.)
The US title of Ann's book is The World Between Two Covers and if you thought it was going to be a potted, bound version of the blog you're going to be disappointed. What the book turned out to be is a very well-written examination of why the Anglophone (specifically UK via Ann's experience and US by extension) reading population and publishing arm reads little world literature, particularly in translation. At best estimate approximately only 3% of non-Anglophone world literature is translated and published in English. Only 3%. That's terrible.
Ann touched briefly on many translation or publication issues on her blog but the book allows her to expand her topics in a very accessibly way. There are a number of roadblocks one encounters when trying to find and read literature by authors (and, by extension, purchase legally) from, say, Burkina Faso or Nepal or Kuwait or Monaco or Lichtenstein. New countries may not have a strong press or literature tradition (or even a written tradition as we define it in Western literature, as Ann found with some island nations). Some authors turn increasingly to the ebook self-publishing industry for publication and access to readers, some are fleetingly available through small specialty presses. A huge list of books to read can be derived from Ann's work both in the actual 197 books she read in 2012 and the books she references in mulling over her experience. The World Between Two Covers will make you think and grow your TBR list by leaps and bounds - which is exactly what happened to me. You can also watch me natter on about this in two videos - I talk about the book and then about some recommendations for literature in translation.
And I made a display at the store because, ugh, so much good stuff to read.
I was slightly dreading the Nobel announcement this year. There was buzz about Bob Dylan and I just didn't want the prize to go to him, no matter how outside a chance it seemed (and then there were the chuckleheads to said it should go to EL James - sorry, my egalitarianism doesn't extend even remotely that far). I'd be much happier to see the prize go to Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, AS Byatt, or comprable (or, if dead people were allowed, Kurt Vonnegut who totally got the shaft in his lifetime).
And the committee managed to surprise me yet again - they selected the Chinese writer, Mo Yan.
Now, I don't think I've run across him before. I don't mind. Finding authors new to me is half the fun of the Nobel when it doesn't go to a favorite of mine. But the nice thing is that he does have a significant body of work translated into English and is either currently available or will be available soon and it is accessible. The committee said nice things about his imagery - "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary" - so I'd like to try on his words for size. This is much easier done than for the awardee last year, Thomas Tranströmer, who writes Swedish poetry and is really hard to find stateside (compared to the 2010 winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose backlist catalogue is just filthy with available books).
The NYT has a nice article which ends with a quote from Mo regarding his decision to attend the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair when China refused to allow dissident writers to attend:
“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”
2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house. In my attempt to "declutter" and "stage" my house for potential buyers I wound up packing up books that I was intending to read! More stress!
According to Goodreads stats (far more accurate than my count-your-reading-journal-pages method), I read 91 books this year , 9 more than last year, but I only read 28,809 pages compared with 29,709 pages last year. This probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire. I had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of December put the kibosh on that. If I had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron (an author I have an obvious favorable bias towards) and Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak; I read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me. Least favorite book was Vixen; it wasn't so bad I wanted to light it on fire, but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research.
I participated in a few challenges this year. The Women Unbound Challenge was the one I completed, even reading one book beyond what I'd planned. Sadly, I didn't get the Complete Booker Challenge 2010 finished; I got three of six Booker-winning novels read but just never got to the other three (I did read one Booker short-list, so not a complete bust). I'm going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011.
My Nostalgia Project stalled out with its initial subject - Flowers in the Attic. Too intense. The Booker Project and Newbery Project are coming along swimmingly, the Newbery especially, but the Best American Project had to go on hold when I had to pack all my Best American books in order to how the house. I didn't make much reading progress on the Nobel Project but I did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor (and I can't quite decide with Vargas Llosa to read...too many good choices there).
In honor of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011, I started a blog specifically for reading chemistry-related books (readingchemistry.blogspot.com). I cross-posted a few science/chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross-post in the future.
This year I also made my first foray into requesting review copies...which added a whole new level of stress because now I feel obligated to read and finish the book I've requested. Thank goodness I didn't go nuts and ask for many more review copies - packing and moving has gotten me far, far behind on the ones I have right now!
I'm always excited for literary prizes (conveniently the Man Booker and the Nobel were within two days of each other this year). I have to say I'm a little surprised the Nobel committee did not choose Adonis, a Syrian poet whose name has been tossed around as a contender for years. I know even less about winner Herta Muller, a Romanian-born German-language writer, than I did JMG le Clezio (2008 Laureate). Muller has won numerous awards in Germany, including the Kleist Prize and the Kafka Prize, so it's not like the Nobel committee picked a dud.
At this point I could get back up on my soapbox like I did when the Booker longlists/shortlists were announced and again complain that it sucks to live in the US and not have access to new and/or quality work coming out of the world literature (can't even get the good UK titles in a reasonable amount of time). Like flogging a decayed pack animal. Tangential to this argument is the insinuation that Americans are too insular and don't read world literature; I'll throw that right back at you and note that we can only read what we can lay our hands on. If publishers are unable or unwilling to negotiate for the translation and publication of non-US work then it's really hard to read world literature. So we read what we can even if that's our own corner of the world. Admittedly, I would have loved to see Kurt Vonnegut awarded the Nobel, a truly wonderful writer, but when you only give out one award per year for the entire world...you lose some of the good ones.
With the goal of "reading more world literature" in mind, I'm going to formally announce two long-term projects: the Nobel Project and the Booker Project. I'm sure other bloggers do this, too, and the goals are similar to my Newbery Project. I'd like to read at least one work by each Nobel Prize for Literature laureate and each of the Booker Prize-winning books...by the time I die. I figure that gives me a good long time to get that accomplished because each project will grow as the years pass. Obviously, I have some winners on each list covered so I might throw those in as "pre-blog" retro posts unless I really want to read the book again (it gives me an excuse to re-read Possession in any case).
