Praveen's Reviews > Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“There were new rules: if you have money you count- no money you are nothing. Who cares if you have read all Hegel?”

I made a rule one day that every time, whenever I get time to visit any book fair, I’ll purchase at least one non-fiction and that non-fiction must fulfill three criteria. First, its cover should be extremely charming, second, it should be bulky, and third, it must be historical. A world book fair was organized in my city last month, I rigorously followed the rule and the book that got qualified for me this year was this one. :)

Last time my choice was Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and prior to that it was India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramchandra Guha. Coincidently I found a great amount of similarity in the writing of these three writers. All three have written their historical accounts in a very alluring and captivating manner, these writers are able to give you a sort of beguiling feel of reading a non-fiction, very much like a fiction, and at the same time they perfect your understanding of history.

Coming back to this book of Svetlana Alexivitch, This book unleashed the knots of my mind. My understanding about the real life of Soviet people increased multi-fold and I felt a peculiar sort of connectivity with the people there. We all are same in our desires and limitations; it does not matter which part of globe, we reside in, and which kind of political system we are inflicted upon, by the authorities.

Our country was suddenly covered in banks and billboards. A new breed of goods appeared. Instead of crummy boots and frumpy dresses, we finally got the stuff we’d always dreamed of: blue jeans, winter coats, lingerie, and descent crockery…everything bright and beautiful. Our old soviet stuff was grey, ascetic, and looked as if it had been manufactured in war time.

This book is written in hybrid style by the author; mixture of a kind of reportage and a kind of documentary on paper. She is a lifelong journalist and her writing has all those flavors of journalism. Reports.. Records …Interviews…Facts...Quest for truth!

She has recorded the voices of housewives, common men, Gulag survivors and ex- communist post holders. Though she has not put forward her own opinion for the sake of conveying a message of a writer in this book, still she has her writerly craft giving voice to the unknown and lost sentiments.

It is said that Alexivitch is anything but a simple recorder of found voices. She has a writerly voice of her own with great style and authority.

Alexievich strongly believes that people who were born in the USSR and those born after its fall in 1991 come “from different planets”. She has recorded some very agonizing and torturous accounts and stories of people in their own words from these periods.

Russian novels don’t teach you how to become successful. How to get rich…Oblomov lies on his couch, Chekov’s protagonists drink tea and complain about their lives… [She falls silent]. There is a famous Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting time’. Few of us remained unchanged. Descent people seem to have disappeared. Now its teeth and elbow everywhere….

I am very happy that I read this book. This is an awesome and phenomenal work by this Nobel Laureate!