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Very touching voices, chronicling the Chernobyl experience and comparing life before and after the moment that changed everything.

Svetlana Alexievich captures the suffering of ordinary people of all walks of life, as well as that of professional staff sent to Chernobyl to deal with the crisis immediately after it happened. She creates a social panorama of the society that was affected in its totality by the nuclear disaster.

I will never forget my feelings in 1986, living in West Germany and attending a small town primary school. All of a sudden, global politics became a tangible reality and a threat. Chernobyl was the first man-made disaster that I experienced and understood. After Chernobyl, nothing was ever as innocent as before again. A wake-up call for my social conscience, you could say. But I never grasped what it was like for the people who were there, who saw it happen, who had to make decisions on their future based on that catastrophe. Reading Alexievich gave me inside knowledge of the nightmare I remember from my childhood. While we were just kept away from certain foods, and weren't allowed to play in the sandbox or go on field trips, people in proximity to Chernobyl fought - often hopelessly - for their lives.

I had to put down the book several times and take a break, as the stories are painful to read, particularly those which tell of ordinary issues and problems, and of ordinary people. The individuals telling their stories are not heroes, and they don't have the privilege of being seen and heard and worshipped for their suffering, like religious martyrs or soldiers. They just happened to be singled out by the shared experience of the disaster:

"We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation."

It is the author's strength to put those silent voices on loudspeaker, to let them have their say, to let them show "the others" what it was really like to live through a nuclear accident. Alexievich gives literature a democratic touch, not putting her creativity in focus, but rather her empathy for the different people she encounters. Her literary skills lies in the careful collection and arrangement of the disparate voices to a reading experience of unique character.

Intense reading! I strongly recommend it to the world of today. Read and think.