Svetlana Alexievich: Reading Notes

Svetlana Alexievich at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin last month. Photograph: Gordon Welters for the Guardian


Svetlana Alexievich
1985, For War’s Unwomanly Face
1992, Boys in Zinc [Zinky Boys]
1997, Chernobyl Prayer,
2013, Second-Hand Time,

Nobel Prize Reviews:

Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills’
Luke Harding, The Guardian, 15 April 2016 03.00 EDT
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/books-interview-svetlana-alexievich-nobel-laureate-2015-chernobyl-30th-anniversary

Svetlana Alexievich: The Memory Keeper: The oral histories of Belarus’s new Nobel laureate.
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker,October 26, 2015 Issue
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/26/the-memory-keeper

Svetlana Alexievich: The Truth in Many Voices
Timothy Snyder, The New York Review of Books, October 12, 2015
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/10/12/svetlana-alexievich-truth-many-voices/

Readings:

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan Wa
Boys in Zinc
Svetlana Alexievich. Grant 35, Autumn 1990
Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait
http://granta.com/boys-in-zinc/

Kokka no hinkaku (The dignity of (a) Nation)

Masahiko Fujiwara
Kokka no hinkaku (The dignity of (a) Nation)
Topics include (from the back cover):

* The illusion of capitalism's triumph
* Pride in a civilization based on emotion
* The importance of Japanese and kanji over English
* Knowing the limits of logic
* The revival of bushido (samurai spirit)
* Why foreign aid is unneccesary
* Love of family, love of hometown, love of the fatherland, love of humanity
* Seeking out a "true elite"