The first book by the Nobel-winning author of Secondhand Time; now in a new translation by the team that translated the text of War and Peace we read for our very first Big Book Challenge. I'd been waiting for months to get my hands on this and it did not disappoint. As with Secondhand Time, we read history through the voices of ordinary Russians who made that history; in this case, our speakers are women who insisted on their right to participate at the front in the Great Patriotic War.
They were antiaircraft gunners, pilots, drivers, surgeons, nurses, telephone operators, partisans and more. Reading these brief, intense individual accounts creates an amazingly layered, almost choral effect. Much of what the women recount is so horrible that the book can't be read quickly; it's just too much. Clothing caked with dried blood is much sharper than that with dried laundry starch. When men die they look up, not to the side. The worst part of hand-to-hand combat is the sound of bones crunching. It's ghoulish, but there's so much more to this book. I learned that many of these women were shunned when they returned from the war - they were considered unmarriageable and unfit for most jobs. Often they returned home after fighting for years to find that family members had been sent to labor camps by Stalin. Many of them willingly left their children in the care of others for the duration, so strongly did they feel about their duty to defend the Motherland. When they returned, their children didn't recognize them and their neighbors wondered if they were capable of caring for their families. Most poignant is the almost universal gratitude they express to Alexievich, for finally listening to their stories.
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