Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2016) — an abbreviated book review

© 2018 Peter Free

 

24 August 2018

 

 

Too tediously repetitive and historically uninformative (as to details) — to be considered a complete success

 

That said, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Random House, 2016), well deserves a place on many perceptive readers' bookshelves.

 

My critique is a reflection of my preference for concise and informationally illuminating writing. Svetlana Alexievich (instead) lets her interviewed subjects incoherently and interminably meander. It is often impossible to know which events inspired the interviewees' (often stream of consciousness) lamentations.

 

Alexievich rarely steps in to provide orienting background detail, or to edit brevity and to-the-point direction into what her subjects have to say.

 

This hands-off authorial trait worked superbly in her shorter, earlier books:

 

 

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (1985, 2017) — 331 pages

 

and

 

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1990, 1992) — 197 pages

 

 

— but not so well (from my purely subjective perspective) in Secondhand Time's 470 pages.

 

 

All three books' strength can be attributed to — what we can call Russian and Soviet poetic "soul"

 

Alexievich's willingness to let interviewees exclusively carry their stories often results in poetically exquisite sentences and insights. The frequency of these, coming as they do from "ordinary" people, exceeds that of most other interview-based writings. For this quality alone, the books are worth their price.

 

See, for example, quotes from Zinky Boys, here.

 

 

A few equally comprehensible extracts — from Secondhand Time

 

These better characterize the beginning of the book than its middle and end.

 

On heroes

 

I learned that the heroes of one era aren't likely to be heroes of the next. . . . Our souls strain and suffer, but not much gets done — there's no strength left over after all that ardor. [page 17]

 

 

Paralleling American paranoia today

 

Gorbachev is an American agent. [page 21 — reminiscent of the USA's current idea that President Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet]

 

 

On economic catastrophe

 

In order to survive, I had to start traveling to Poland with big bags of light bulbs and children's toys. The train car would be full of teachers, engineers, doctors . . . all of them with bags and sacks. [page 23]

 

There is no surviving on today's pensions. . . . A person got trampled here in the liquor aisle. [page 82]

 

 

Regarding the disparu

 

My father's parents disappeared in the Mordovian camps. [page 25]

 

 

Despair, bitterness and the human condition

 

He burned alive in his vegetable patch, among his cucumbers . . . Poured acetone over his head and lit a match. . . . You're not from around here, what do you care? What do you need a strangers' grief for? [page 78]

 

 

Wryness about life

 

You can do whatever you want before you're forty, you can even sin. But after forty, you have to repent. Then God will forgive you. [page 83]

 

 

A more indicative extract — showing the book's too characteristic incoherence

 

Half the time, I had no idea what — in precisely described historical time — Alexievich's interviewee was talking about.

 

The author provides little to no help in orienting her readers. As a result, much of the book's one-sided conversation is untethered from comprehensible reality.

 

One (metaphorically) suspects that some of these people were drunk, mentally ill, or erratically wandering through a waking dream. Or, perhaps, sloppily articulating an undisciplined stream of consciousness.

 

Alexievich makes no evident attempt to guide them into understandably framing their reminiscences.

 

By way of illustrative example

 

Consider this extract:

 

I went to the cemetery . . . Near the gates, there was a guardhouse with boarded-up windows. I knocked for a long time. The guard came out, he was blind . . . What kind of omen was this. "Would you mind pointing out where they buried the exiles?" "Oh . . . over there . . ." and he waved his hand up and down. Some people led me out to the furthest corner . . . There was nothing, but grass there . . . Nothing else left. That night I couldn't sleep, I felt like I was suffocating. I was having a spasm . . . It felt like someone was choking me . . . I ran away from the hotel and went to the station. I walked through the empty town. The station house was closed. I sat down on the tracks and waited for morning. A guy and a girl were sitting on the banks of the railway. Kissing. It finally got light out. The train came. An empty tram car . . . We got in: me and four men in leather jackets with shaved heads. They looked like convicts. They started offering me bread and pickles. "Wanna play some cards?" I wasn't afraid of them.

 

Not long ago, I was on the trolley bus and suddenly remembered . . . Vladya used to sing this song: "I went searching for my darling's grave/ But her grave is hard to find . . ." Turns out it also used to be Stalin's favorite song . . . he'd cry whenever he heard it. [pages 229-230]

 

 

I grant that the above passage has graceful poetic quality — (which is why I selected it)

 

But, from my curmudgeon's perspective, who wants to spend hundreds of pages — and hours of a waning life — wandering through other people's discombobulated, interminably flowing quasi-lunacy?

 

 

Much of the book's artistic, impressionistic delivery — refers to history that American readers do not know

 

In thinking about why I had to set Secondhand Time aside for a long period — after reading less than half — I realized that it is more boringly repetitive (in personal perspective) than the other two Alexievich books that I have read.

 

Individual personality seems less widely distributed along Secondhand Time's spectrum of humanly relevant insight.

 

This quality may explain why Secondhand Time's people uniformly lament the demise of the Soviets' bureaucratized and rigidly enforced system. Figuratively speaking, they are identically manufactured cinder blocks crying in sadness over their lost, once samely constructed behavioral monolith. To their minds (and mine) the oligarchically created chaos that followed the USSR's collapse was terrible. It is just that one can read only so much identical perspective, without becoming bored.

 

Also pertinent — to my disenchantment with Secondhand Time — may be the fact that I am much more familiar with Russian and Soviet history before the USSR's collapse.

 

Secondhand Time almost nothing to remedy these deficiencies in the average reader's background knowledge. That's understandable. The interviewees have no reason to suspect that readers will not be familiar with the events that they are addressing.

 

So, on the one hand:

 

the interviewees go on and on and on about their emotions (about the dissolution of the Soviet system)

 

but, on the other

 

they say almost nothing at all about the precise historical details that led them to feel as they do.

 

Even orienting oneself to exactly when — in terms of just what year — the interviewee is remembering is frequently impossible.

 

One can read only so many laments, delivered in similar words and with the same perceptions, without the reading process becoming tediously unenlightening.

 

Aesthetically, I also wonder what is gained by having so many pages of essentially the same, obtusely delivered stuff.

 

 

In sum — the lack of historical detail and its narrative incoherence — comprise the gist of my critique of this book

 

These characteristics explain why the volume now sits on my shelf to be picked up and read in short bits only.

 

For specific facts and historically framed precision, one has to go elsewhere.

 

 

Should Alexievich have stepped in — to condense and cogently order — her subjects' tedious meanderings?

 

I think so.

 

But, in an important sense, I am being unfair. Documenting distress, even if it is delivered in frequently incomprehensible form, has artistic and historical place. The majority of online reviews of this book are ecstatic about its quality.

 

Nevertheless, I document these few caveats, so as to caution prospective readers, who are built like I am.

 

If you are cogence-preferring person, Secondhand Time is probably not for you.

 

 

The moral? — A delightful book for readers attracted to its poetically personalized . . .

 

. . . but poorly organized and impressionistic subject matter.

 

The book is arguably too repetitive, incoherent, and lacking in orienting historical description to carry its presumed message to — "OMG, get to the point" — readers.

 

In my estimation, Alexievich's shorter and (maybe) more coherently edited books — The Unwomanly Face of War and her Zinky Boys — are exquisitely better. Those two are treasures.

 

In comparison, Secondhand Time remains in my small library mainly as a treasury of poem-like, mentally erratic observations. Something that one can return to for short readings and without expecting consistently comprehensible narrative flow.

 

This is a book that one can pick up, turn to any page, and begin reading. One is rewarded, at some humanity-loving level, in the process.