The Financial Times, where I turn to more often than to the TLS or the LRB for Arts & Books news and reviews - the FT is more radical and less modish - invited readers to submit their Book of the Year. I picked Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, reviewed here on 5 September 2017 and gave the required hundred word supporting statement which appears today at:
https://www.ft.com/content/8d0ab684-e716-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec
But see the original review for the full supporting case.
Google sometimes directs to the wrong page on this site. If you don't get the page you were expecting type book author name into the search bar below All books reviewed have been purchased by me unless very occasionally indicated. For more about the reviewer, google "Trevor Pateman". I do not have an X account and never had a Twitter account; that is another Trevor Pateman
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Showing posts with label svetlana alexievich the unwomanly face of war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label svetlana alexievich the unwomanly face of war. Show all posts
Saturday 30 December 2017
Tuesday 5 September 2017
Review: Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War
In 1978, Svetlana
Alexievich (1948- ) began the interviews which comprise this book. It was
turned down for publication in 1983, but Soviet Perestroika allowed it to be published in a censored and
self-censored but impressively large state edition in 1985. It is now
translated in an edition which restores omitted material, but it was the 1985
edition which underpinned the award of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature to
Alexievich, who was born in Ukraine but is now Belarussian by nationality.
Alexievich does
in-depth oral history and then composes her material into books where there is
only a small amount of authorial narrative. In this book, she assembled the
voices of women who were with the Red Army in the second world war, at the
front and especially in the bloodlands of
Russia’s western front, Germany’s eastern front. Partisan, underground
and liaison front liners are also well represented.
The narratives are
harrowing and I read the book slowly, in sections, so as not to skip too easily
over what was being told. Several times I was struck by the thought that these
are the women who survived and lived to tell the tale thirty of forty years
later, often hesitantly and in tears. Many others would have survived the war but died
before then; some would have emigrated to Israel and maybe other countries;
some refused to co-operate with the historian.
Several times also I
thought this would make a splendid choice as a core text for a course in gender
theory. It would disrupt a great deal of polite and facile thinking. Alexievich’s
women have a lot to say about being women at the front line and are acutely
aware of the tensions between their transgender occupations as snipers and
fighter pilots and their previous existence as young women – often girls – in pretty
frocks. There are no lesbians in the book, which I am sure has everything to do
with Russian culture not the author’s selectivity. There is one woman who claims to be a man to get into the navy and tells a very funny story about it (pp. 202 -3). But there is a general
absence of vodka which surprised me.
There are many splendid examples of young women refusing to take No for an answer even from hardened Soviet bureaucrats. Most of those who fought at the front had first to overcome attempts to place them at the rear when they volunteered. Several simply hitched lifts or hid under tarpaulin to get to the front line and once there tried to make themselves useful and resisted attempts to send them away. Some were under eighteen and under average height. A repetitive theme is the complaint that they had to wear men's army uniforms and boots many sizes too big for them.Only late in the war did the Soviet bureaucracy start supplying appropriate clothing.
There are many splendid examples of young women refusing to take No for an answer even from hardened Soviet bureaucrats. Most of those who fought at the front had first to overcome attempts to place them at the rear when they volunteered. Several simply hitched lifts or hid under tarpaulin to get to the front line and once there tried to make themselves useful and resisted attempts to send them away. Some were under eighteen and under average height. A repetitive theme is the complaint that they had to wear men's army uniforms and boots many sizes too big for them.Only late in the war did the Soviet bureaucracy start supplying appropriate clothing.
Alexievich’s patience
and empathy – she cries a lot too – is rewarded with astonishing cameos and
vignettes which made me cry too. Not the ones which are tales of the kinds of
barbarism which still happen every day in modern war zones, but the absurd and
poignant. There is the female commander of an anti-aircraft gun, listening to a wireless in the middle of the night and first to hear
the Victory declaration. She then rouses her team from sleep to ready their big
gun, and personally fires a four-round Victory salute, only to be arrested and
then promptly un-arrested by the senior officer she has woken up (p 204). There
are the boy and girl kissing publicly on a ghetto bench while a German pogrom is in progress. They are observed with
horror by a female Soviet underground fighter who then realises, as the couple stand
up and are shot, that they have seen their public kiss as a way of ensuring
that they die together (p 208 - 09).
She also elicits oral one-liners
which any writer would be proud of and she saves a couple until late in the
book. An underground fighter explains that now, decades after the war, she
doesn’t like spring. The war stands
between us, between me and nature. When the cherry trees were in bloom, I saw
fascists in my native Zhitomir (p 277). And on the last page, a
medical assistant, Tamara Stepanova Umnyagina, tells us that There can’t be one heart for hatred and
another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my
heart. (p 331)
Do read this book and remember that the context is a war in which twenty million Soviet citizens died, leaving after-shocks which still continue.
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See my Blog of 7 February 2017 for a review of Alexievich's Second-Hand Time
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See my Blog of 7 February 2017 for a review of Alexievich's Second-Hand Time
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