Nobels: 2015: Svetlana Alexievich

Pic by Elke Wetzig CC BY-SA 3.0

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belorussian documentarist. The book that I have read, Boys in Zinc, is based on interviews with former soldiers in the Soviet action in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989 and with their family members - most often mothers.

It's a fairly harrowing read. The descriptions by the soldiers of what the war was like are often detailed and distressing, as of course they should be. But the testimony is not just about the nature of war, but is set among the collapse of the Soviet Union - in part triggered by the war - and spans a change in attitudes towards the soldiers. There's a general sense of grievance that soldiers went off to Afghanistan on rhetoric that evoked the Great Patriotic War and promised them hero status, but returned to a society that saw the war as a terrible mistake, a crime even, and wanted nothing to do with the veterans.

The edition I've been reading (Penguin 2017, translated by Andrew Bromfield) includes a selection of documents about "Boys in Zinc on trial". After publication two of those interviewed sued Alexievich for (broadly speaking) libel. By this time Belarus was an independent country, and much less reformed than most of the former Soviet states. There's a suspicion that the suits were brought on the instigation of the government and army, to denounce the way the interviews had portrayed the former Soviet army. The result was mixed. Alexievich had to pay some damages.I suspect the legal action only highlighted the problems her book reported.

And presumably was a factor in her winning the Prize. With Alexievich we run straight into one of those questions that always plague the prize: does the Academy have a political agenda in making the award? Oh dear, here we hit the problem of "what is political?". Just yesterday an MP accused the opposition of trying to make the death of a homeless man a political issue. And in America, anti-gun protestors are sometimes accused of bringing politics into the debate. It's an irregular verb: I apply common sense; you bring politics into it; he she or it has an ideology.

The campaign against Alexeivich was a political campaign which threatened freedom of expression. Of course the Nobel academy should take that into account and can reasonably use the award as a means of defending literature itself.

A worthwhile read about a subject not many of us know much about. As a start on this Nobel project, it's what I hoped for: I've been led to something I would never have read otherwise, and enjoyed it.

Coming next: depending on the postal service either Alice Munro or Patrick Modiano.

Nobel Prize winners

I'm starting a project to read and blog about books by winners of the Nobel prize for literature. Here are some initial thoughts and ground rules.

1. I'm going to skip over winners where I've already read some of their books. This means, for example, that I won't be reading many of the British and Irish winners. (Britain and Ireland have done remarkably well in this award, by the way, usually prompting a response of utter indifference from the establishment in Britain at least. That's a shame; it's one thing Britain can still be proud of.)
2. This means I'll probably be reading lots of books in translation ...
3. ... and so I might skip over poets in a language I don't know at all (eg Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish winner in 2011 and, I believe, a robot in disguise). I don't believe that "poetry is what gets lost in translation" but a huge part of my enjoyment of poetry comes from the way language is used abnormally - difference in register, syntactical quirks, etc - and that may not come across well.
4. But I'll try to read French and Spanish books in the original.
5. Generally I'll be working backwards, but it will depend on what I can find. It might be tricky to get hold of anything by Sully Prudhomme (1901) these days, but it will be a long time before I have to try.

I'm skipping over Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) and Bob Dylan (2016) and so I start with Svetlana Alexievich and her book Boys in Zinc.

Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter

Just after Britain's been congratulating itself on 100 years of some women being given the right to vote - oh, weren't we so enlightened! - this book from just 34 years ago probably gives some idea of what attitudes to suffragists were really like.

Caroline Blackwood visited the peace camp at Greenham Common in March 1984 and the persistent thread of her short account is the sexualised abuse directed at the women. Auberon Waugh (whose comic viewpoint on "relentless women's issues" Matthew Parris has recently praised and mourned) alleged that the women smelled of "fish paste and bad oysters". The press had described them as "belligerent harpies", "a bunch of smelly lesbians" and "screaming destructive witches". Every night British troops protecting the American base would shout abuse at them. Youths from Newbury would attack the camps, pouring pig's blood over the improvised "benders" in which the women were trying to sleep. Bailiffs would wilfully destroy every possession they could.

It's really not far from the kind of abuse that women's suffrage campaigners had been suffering just 80 years earlier and of course it says more about male fears than it does about the actual conditions at the camp or what the women were actually doing. What the women were actually doing looks to have been incredibly boring. In Blackwood's account, they saw themselves as witnesses, rather than agents. Of course they knew they could not stop deployment of the missiles but they could ensure that it was noticed. They were a small voice against the threat of nuclear annihilation.

One of the more amusing aspects of the book is the account of court proceedings. Women would be charged for various offences and the cases would then descend into drawn-out arguments about the details of what happened and the reliability of prosecution witness being asked to describe accurately, so that there should be no reasonable doubt, what had happened in the darkness months ago. Undoubtedly, one of the women's tactics was to tie the court system up with these ridiculous hearings.

There was even an echo of the "cat and mouse" treatment received by suffragists. The conditions at the camp were so appalling that some women wouldn't mind too much a short stay in Holloway, just to get warm and dry. Sentence over, they'd return to the camp with renewed vigour.

It's possible to argue that the women's views were wrong and their tactics were badly chosen, I suppose. Blackwood questions and disagrees with one particular practice as unnecessary and unhelpful provocation. But the reaction to the camp, from the authorities and from individuals, now seems so excessive; it's hard to believe it happened.

And yet in similar circumstances today, we know exactly the people who'd be condemning and slandering the women involved. Many of those who've recently sought to borrow prestige from female emancipation, as if it were something freely given by an enlightened state, would be piling into the scrum of disapproval. There'd be an army of frothing men lining up with their sexual disgust barely disguised as common sense and "good-natured lightheartedness, even kindness" about "relentless women's issues".


Caroline Blackwood: On the Perimeter Flamingo Books, 1984