Boys in Zinc: Svetlana Alexievich (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Yesterday my friend was killed, he took a bullet in the head, and kept running another ten meters, trying to catch his own brains…” Seven years later, the same fellow is a successful businessman, who likes to tell stories about Afghanistan. During her career in journalism, Alexievich specialized in crafting narratives based on witness testimonies. Occasionally we went to the theatre or the cinema, but all he really wanted to do was to stay at home. No one is driven insane by these pictures—for instance, there’s a man lying on the ground who was killed not by the elements, not by fate, but by another man.

Likewise with Russia which opened itself up through Glasnost, overthrew communism, but now lapses into authoritarianism. I keep starting these posts and then stopping, often breaking off in the middle of a sentence in the hope that it’ll make it easier to jump back in at some imaginary later date when I’m somehow more balanced, more able to concentrate, more stable. He hadn’t sent a telegram to warn me that he was coming, and I had gone to my friend’s flat to celebrate her birthday. Perhaps the most balanced comment here was left by the former 'Afghani' (a veteran of the conflict), Pavel Shetko, although concluding comments by the author offered in her defence are worthy of note.The Afghan war has been likened to Vietnam in that it shocked the population at home and provoked dissent, opening a devastating crack into the monolithic Soviet Union, and arguably precipitating its demise. We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. He’d got hepatitis, malaria and everything else rolled into one but he warned his sister not to tell me. The second half is about the trial the author went through after publication as Russia battled to understand it's own position in regard to the war. It was messy, it was Russia’s (or the USSR’s) Vietnam war: pointless, impossible, a loss of life on both sides and a serious financial burden.

Boys in Zinc (a reference to the metal coffins in which casualties were sent back to Russia) is an indictment of war, the horrors witnessed by the young conscripts and the grief of mothers who have lost an only child. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Author Svetlana Aleksievich nominated for 2014 Nobel Prize Archived 2015-01-07 at the Wayback Machine". Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Baranovichi was another 100 kilometres and when we got to the airport there it was after working hours and there was nobody about, except for a night watchman in his hut.

Alexievich, writing in the same reportage style as in Chernobyl Prayer, dives into the voices of soldiers who served and survived, of the widows and bereaved mothers of the dead, of doctors and nurses and scientists and other Russian staff who worked in the warzone without being military, and always the same massive problems are repeated: the ready access to heroin, the torture and dismemberment frequently performed by the guerilla “enemies”, the confused narrative given to the soldiers that they must protect their homeland, Russia, by murdering and stealing the homeland of other people.It is important that we continue to promote these adverts as our local businesses need as much support as possible during these challenging times. I remembered the howl of a mother in a village near Minsk when they carried a zinc coffin into the house. The haunting history of the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2015- A new translation based on the updated text - From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe.

When they brought the zinc coffin into the room, I lay on top of it and measured it again and again. I got a few blocks away and then the pain in my knee and my hip started increasing more and more and more and so I cycled back, using only my left leg to turn the pedals (and my right side just to balance the bike) and I came home, crying. I went to the Military Commissariat and the commissar started shouting at me, telling me it was a state secret that my son had died, that I shouldn’t run around telling everyone.The point of entry was small, but inside, their intestines, their liver, their spleen were all ripped and torn apart. The war had its own ghastly rules: if you were photographed or if you shaved before a battle, you were dead. You might only sit down on a bench and smoke a cigarette together, but you feel as if you’ve been talking to each other the whole day.