Chernobyl Prayer: Svetlana Alexievich’s Heart-Breaking Oral History

“What I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our story on earth and in time. I paint and collect mundane feelings, thoughts and words. I am trying to capture the life of the soul.”

The remarkable thing about Chernobyl Prayer is that Alexievich does achieve all of this. The bulk of the book is given over to monologues (and occasionally choruses) by people who lived near Chernobyl, worked on the cleanup, saw loved ones die from radiation, etc. Some are experts like atomic scientists, doctors, politicians and engineers, but most are ordinary people who got caught up in the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine and the subsequent spread of radiation which, because of the wind direction, spread mostly across Belarus (23% of Belarus’s land is contaminated, the cancer rate has risen 74-fold, and only one person in 14 dies of old age).