It’s at moments like this, when you’re trying to take your vacation in a militarily controlled nuclear disaster zone – for which, I might add, there is no proper guidebook – that you must be more than normally willing to expose yourself as a fool in the service of your goals.
his quote sums up so much about this wonderful, hilarious, grim, offbeat and powerful book. Based on the conceit of creating a tourist’s guide to the world’s most polluted places, starting with Chernobyl, it is a tour de force exposé of the waste and havoc we cause with our industrial lives, in ways we hardly expect and prefer not to think about.
But of course the book is much more. It is also a tribute to the average people who live at or near these places, working in them, enduring them, cleaning them up. And Blackwell’s writing is so wonderfully self-effacing and observant, so ripe with stunning turns of phrase, that it is – despite its disturbing subject matter – a delight to read.
Indeed, one can’t help being fascinated by these horrific places, contaminated by radiation or tailings or trash, or oil and chemical spills, while at the same time having little interest in visiting them. Thank God for Blackwell’s fortitude.
The title essay, about Blackwell’s trip to Chernobyl and its environs, where he tries to convince local guards to let him canoe and fish in the Pripyat river, is perhaps the best at drawing the stark contrast between what we think about these places, and what they are really like. As he remarks at one point,
Most people came to Chernobyl just to get their two photographs… They treat the staff like servants and leave. They never bother to find out what a nice place the zone can be.
Other chapters take us to the Gyre – where swirls of ocean-bound trash congregate in the Pacific, to Amazon forests being torched to make way for soy, to the gargantuan coal sands mining operation in Canada, to ground zero of the oil boom in Texas to the polluted Ganges. Along the way, it is the people he meets, their dialogue, the stories of their lives, that make this book a true find.
Lilin’s first book of memoir/fiction, Siberian Education, told the gritty, captivating tale of his upbringing in the criminal world. His new novel (part autobiographical, part based on a composite of the stories and lives of those Lilin lived and served with) is a powerful, first-person look inside Russian military service, and behind the lines of the brutal second war in Chechnya (1999-2000).
The narrator, Nicolai, is unwittingly drafted into the service at 18, offered a cushy, elite placement, but busted to the “Saboteurs” – an elite group of special forces and sniper troops, for having the temerity to suggest that he was not interested in being a soldier. Thus is the anti-soldier forced to become a soldier’s soldier.
There are few rules in the world of Lilin’s regiment of Saboteurs, other than complete and utter loyalty to one’s officers and one’s Saboteur brothers. Retreat is forbidden, as is leaving a fallen comrade behind, and death is preferred over surrender. No surprise that this unit is given the most dangerous missions in the war.
As Lilin shows, the brutality and chaos of the war in the mountains and decimated cities of Chechnya are frightening and violent. Yet also somehow compelling and certainly true. These are not young men striving to be heroes, just to survive.
Indeed, this is not the Caucasian war we hear about on the evening news (then again, when was the last time we heard about Chechnya on the evening news?). This is the harrowing, dehumanizing up-close and terrifying combat of modern warfare that we prefer not to think about. And this is really the point of Lilin’s novel, to make us think about his protagonists’ struggle, despite the odds, to maintain their humanity in inhumane circumstances, to return to the world of the living and make the rest of us understand the effects of war on those who are sent to fight them.
A difficult tale powerfully told.
Widely regarded as one of the great science fiction novels of all time, Roadside Picnic has nonetheless been out of print (in English) for three decades. This new translation by a Russian-born mathematician living in the U.S. was a labor of love. And it paid off. Dark, racy and unpredictable, this novel – the basis for the classic film S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – shows how science fiction was such a powerful platform for dissent, and the venue for many of the freest writers in the waning Soviet Union.
In her third solo album since Bering Strait, Borzilova offers up an eclectic mix of country, rap, acoustic guitar and folk that is deeply personal and oddly affecting.
Stories from her personal life – her father’s work as the lead Chernobyl cleanup scientist; her daredevil grandmother; her grappling with motherhood and failed relationships – abound in these eleven songs.
Most powerful is the haunting “One Second Flat,” about a teen suddenly thrust into adulthood at her father’s premature death, “Gotta getaway, but she can’t run that fast…”
A close second is “Tiny Little Things,” about how children force one out of selfishness and bring what is truly important into focus. There is a bit of Russian in the off-kilter lullaby “Long Night,” which artfully mixes rap and eerie Russian fairy tales into something of a tribute to sleeplessness.
The liner notes are also a real plus, with Borzilova offering a short commentary on the origin and context of each song.
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