Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Chernobyl Prayer is an oral history compiled by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich from several years of interviews that she conducted among the people who experienced the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant firsthand.

So she stays by his side, and she helps him through the fortnight it takes him to die, as his skin starts peeling off and all his colleagues die one by one. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA View image in fullscreen The ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster at the Mitino cemetery in Moscow.In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages.

Alexievich’s Nobel win was unexpected because her books are non-fiction, a kind of oral history (although as this New Republic article points out, she takes considerable liberties with the testimonies she collects).

Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. What stands out from Chernobyl Prayer are the personal stories, the “missing history” of ordinary people and the wide variety of ways in which they see and experience and think about the same event. It begins with the story of the young, pregnant wife of one of the first fire fighters, who responded to the fire at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and of his slow, untimely death. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.

Scientists estimate that it may take 20,000 years for the area around the plant to again become habitable.

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This book gives a voice to the anger, pain, and heartbreak, but it is seldom an easy voice to listen to, because it forces the reader to confront how little they really know about what will one day be remembered among the most significant events of the 20th century. The death toll is highly contested, but when we include indirect deaths from conditions associated with radiation exposure and the resulting hereditary genetic defects, it is possible the number is in the tens of thousands, and still rising.The cancers induced by exposure to high levels of radiation brought Valentina, whose intense love for her husband was laid bare, to face day by day the death of her husband and with her own happiness.