Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, 470 pages.

Alexievich, the winner for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, talked to people  all over Russia and in the former Soviet republics and recorded their stories. The stories come quickly, with the shifting of voice indicated sometimes with a simple dash. Everyone is upset about the changes in their lives, and how one feels about the changes in the availability of salami is a indicator of their level of hope for the future.
There are a host of grim stories here; reminiscences from the times of Stalin and the Gulag, as well as more recent accounts of rape, murder, and beatings during the wars, armed conflicts, uprisings, massacres, and other violent interactions in Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbijan, Georgia, Belarus, and other regions.
People tell Aexievich of their loss of identity, their economic dislocation, and the trauma they have experienced during the end of the Soviet era and into the present. A surprising number of people tell of their wish that communism, especially that strain found during the era of Stalin would return. Knowing that there was only one set of truths, believing that your country was great (and single-handedly defeated Hitler), and knowing that your neighbors suffering was on par with your own seems worth the price of freedom and possible failure. Everywhere the men drink and lash out at strangers, the vulnerable, and their families. The women and children, the elderly, and anyone living in a land not decidedly their own suffers horribly.
Fascinating, grim, and sad.

The Mathematician's Shiva / Stuart Rojstaczer 366 p.

Rachela Karnokovitch, one of the twentieth century's great mathematicians, has just died, and her small but close extended family, all Polish-Jewish emigres, would like to mourn her in peace.  But it's entirely possible that at some point in her illustrious career Rachela has solved the celebrated Navier Stokes problem in mathematics without telling anyone, and has left behind the evidence in her papers.  During the seven-day period of mourning, Rachela's son Sasha is imposed upon in her tiny Wisconsin house by a horde of socially dysfunctional and intellectually greedy mathematicians.

Rojstaczser is a former Duke geophysicist writing his first novel here.  It's almost certainly autobiographical (the Sasha character is a climatologist), which I suspect is both blessing and curse.  The blessing is that he can write deeply and convincingly about his characters and their Soviet/Polish/Jewish emigre culture.  The curse is that it's all far too much for what could have been a slim but powerful story.  Too much detail dilutes the very little bit of narrative tension there is.  By the end one has the sensation of stepping outside after a pleasant but over-long family reunion.

Hostage / Elie Wiesel 224 p.

It is 1975 and Shaltiel Feigenberg has been abducted from his Brooklyn home, seemingly at random, by an Arab and an Italian and will be released when Israel releases 3 Palestinian prisoners. During his time in captivity, he tells himself and his captors stories, mostly from his own life: hidden in the home of a wealthy German nobleman during the war to serve as his chess opponent, a brother in love with Soviet communism emigrates to Moscow only to later escape, a wife, beloved in spite of Shaltiel's infidelities, for which he makes flimsy excuses to both her and the narrator.

The narrative of Shaltiel's abduction is faintly drawn, only barely visible amidst the constant fog of Shaltiel's memories. I found myself unable to care whether S. survived or not, although his many back stories were interesting. His captors, Luigi the Italian and Ahmed the Arab, play good cop, bad cop with him. The portrait of Ahmed is pure caricature; of course there are many fanatically religious and violent young Arab men, but Wiesel never allows us to see anything remotely distinct or individual about him.

The weak frame of this story was obviously constructed for hanging Wiesel's philosophical and historical thoughts. Nothing wrong with that, of course; I frankly just didn't understand quite a lot of the writing.