| My Book of the Year |
History Book |
| Svetlana Alexeivitch "Second Hand Time" , Hay Festival , December 1, 2016 |
“Second Hand Time” by Svetlana Alexeivich is seven pages short of seven hundred in length. Unlike the baggy monsters that are the norm for the fiction of America, an Editor has been at work. Not a page is redundant. Alexeivich's subject is the last European Empire. Her book's scope is sweeping, its effect cumulative, its content sobering and unique. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 provoked much comment for its unorthodoxy. Arts commentators know no history. Had they troubled to look the prize winner for 2015 went not to an imaginative writer but to an author whose skills were those of a journalist. Voices on Russia are a regular at Hay; Kasparov from within, Oliver Bullough and Tim Judah, extensive travellers, from without. They have reported on the facts of geography, the twenty thousand abandoned villages, the thirty-five thousand with fewer than ten inhabitants, the plummeting population, the life expectancy lower than many African countries. The Alexeivitch voice is the inner geography, a woman with a tape recorder catching the voices of authenticity. Some of the material is familiar, echoing Solzhenitsyn or Conquest. The more modern is new. Moscow is the most Moslem of European cities. Police murder of immigrants goes uninvestigated. For her epic view the author is modest “I was just the right person in the right place. I met people who had met Lenin.” The central issue is the opposite of Germany. “When I look around Russia the hate horrifies me, the necessity to hate someone.” She observes the “absolute lack of desire to reflect on the main thing, Stalin and the war.” One of her voices speaks of the conquest of Germany. Every female, age ten to eighty, was target for rape. A new law prohibits dishonour of the armed forces. Anthony Beevor, the historian of Berlin 1945, would now on visit to Russia be liable for arrest. “Second Hand Time” is essential reading for insight to the Europe of our era. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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