War's Unwomanly Face in Reading with Style

Nov 07, 2013 ☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Вечная память тем кто воевал, кто там был. Вечный позор тем, кто лезет со своей критикой, туда, не знает куда...

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Mar 07, 2019 Megan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: radiating-affinities, in-translation, noteworthy-reads-2019, non-fiction

This was intense, full of grief and full of attention, and it was clearly crafted with immense thoughtfulness and love. War seems inescapably a gendered (binary gendered) experience, and Alexievich relates the first-hand accounts in a moving fashion. She stitches the stories together with insightful passages about everything: war and victory, life and death, hate and love, remembering and forgetting, speaking and not speaking. Her project is a living thing, as she says herself, and I was struck This was intense, full of grief and full of attention, and it was clearly crafted with immense thoughtfulness and love. War seems inescapably a gendered (binary gendered) experience, and Alexievich relates the first-hand accounts in a moving fashion. She stitches the stories together with insightful passages about everything: war and victory, life and death, hate and love, remembering and forgetting, speaking and not speaking. Her project is a living thing, as she says herself, and I was struck by just how un-romanticized it is as a whole, without diminishing the experiences and the elevated emotions, the suffering and the intensity of living on the brink of life/death. She achieves this, I think, from her focus on the small details these women remember, their honesty in the specifics. She writes, "I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times."

Another passage I'd like to keep:

There have been thousands of wars on earth (I read recently that they've counted up more than three thousand—big and small), but war remains, as it has always been, one of the chief human mysteries. Nothing has changed. I am trying to bring that great history down to human scale, in order to understand something. To find the words. Yet in this seemingly small and easily observable territory—the space of one human soul—everything is still less comprehensible, less predictable than in history. Because before me are living tears, living feelings. A living human face, which the shadows of pain and fear pass over as we talk. Occasionally a subversive hunch even creeps in of the barely perceptible beauty of human suffering. Then I get frightened of my own self...

There is only one path—to love this human being. To understand through love.

...more

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