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'Voices From Chernobyl' Author Svetlana Alexievich Wins Lit Nobel (theguardian.com)
Lawrence Bottorff writes: The author of Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Svetlana Alexievich, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's somewhat surprising, since she is an investigative journalist and not a fiction writer/novelist. And yet her "novels in voices" style, as the Nobel jurists believe, clearly has a literary impact. Here's what a review from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine says about Voices from Chernobyl:
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
...I don't see it wrong to consider the duration of the research effort plus the historical record it leaves (ie, so future generations have a harder time making contrary claims in hindsight) s not being valid criteria for a lifetime body of work. Indeed, after the period of speculative hysteria in the news is over, immediate documentation is the best way to ensure that the legacy and history is realistically preserved. The era of photography began to help this (though is subject to manipulation) but getting the narrative of the participants recorded before they have an opportunity to retroactively change their opinions too much is helpful in honestly understanding what happened.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
> Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book,
> Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
According to most of the articles I've read (in the last 15 minutes), her most popular and acclaimed book is War’s Unwomanly Face which is an oral history of Russian woman who fought in WWII. It sold more than 2 million copies.
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I've actually read the "Voices of Chernobyl" long time ago. It's over-emotional crap with very little actual facts and some outright lies: Alexievich's husband was treated in the Moscow radiological military hospital by qualified staff (not by some fearful nurses), being a bone marrow donor does not lead to a disability and it's certainly not performed in the same operating room on a table next to the bone marrow recipient (yet her memoirs graphically describe it).
Either you didn't read it very carefully, or you haven't remembered it very well. It's not 'her memoirs', but an oral history compiled from interviews. The bone marrow recipient was a fireman at Chernobyl, Vasily Ignatenko, the husband of one of the interviewees, Lyudmilla Ignatenko, and the story is told in her own words - see the prologue to a long extract from the book:
http://www.alexievich.info/kni...
Since Mrs Ignatenko's husband died after 2 weeks of horrible suffering, it seems bizarre (and incredibly callous) to label her experiences as 'over-emotional crap' unless you have some sort of agenda here. It is clear from the extract that Ignatenko was treated in a specialist radiological hospital (you seem to be implying it isn't) and we can hardly blame Mrs Ignatenko for perhaps attributing her sister-in-law's subsequent ill health to the transplant.
I would suggest Slashdot readers form their own judgements about this book.
Oh for fuck's sake.
Can a woman not write a book about women without the "anti-SJW" crowd whining at length? You haven't even read the damn thing, yet here you are crying about it. What the fuck is so "feminist" (boo! hiss!) about a work documenting women who fought in a war? It's history, and the type of history anyone interested in the subject likely appreciates. She's a 67-year-old Ukrainian, not one of the 14-year-old Tumblr users who you lot think are ruining the world.
You're becoming the assholes who leave comments on non-political articles whining about "Obummer." Christ.
Do you notice how her books lack stories like this:
My family lived 25 kilometers from Chernobyl in a small village, my husband worked on a small furniture factory and I worked as a teacher. Several days after the explosion, soldiers came to us and told that we'll have to relocate soon. We were allowed to take only small personal items and all of them were inspected.
We were offered a new apartment in Ryazan' and received several thousand rubles, enough to buy new furniture. We also got cards to buy imported Bulgarian child food for our 6-months old son. Even after the USSR collapse we received free medical checkups every year and our son got free admission into a top Russian university. He's working as a nuclear engineer in Bryanks now.
A true story, I worked with their son. But of course, this story is not sufficiently full of bullcrap to win a Nobel.