The Best Book I Read This Year

In an essay published recently in the Oregonian, I mentioned that I read between 110 and 140 books every year.

Naturally, people ask me what’s good -- in other words, what I’ve read that I’d recommend. I’m usually at a loss, partly because I read so many books that it’s hard to recall most of them offhand -- I even forget the titles of some of the ones I liked -- and partly because I don’t know enough about the other person’s taste to be able to predict what he or she would enjoy.

But I can unequivocally state the best book I’ve read this year, possibly in several years, is Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich. It conveys the utter poetry and beauty, as well as the absolute horror, of ordinary lives caught up by extraordinary circumstances. You could pull the scripts for a dozen great plays and films out of the true stories it contains, if people could believe them.

SOME OF THE OTHERS

Don’t get me wrong; this has been a great year for reading, otherwise. I’ve read novels that were magical, including Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and two by Anthony Marr, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno -- any of which would be an excellent choice for a book discussion group.

I’ve read more “significant” books. Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution 1863-1877 says a lot about a neglected stretch of U.S. history most of us know little about, yet has stunning implications for today. Isabel Wilkinson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: the epic story of America’s Great Migration shows why race relations in our big cities of the east, north, and west (especially New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, never mind the South), are in such a mess today.

I’ve hugely enjoyed books by and about artists and writers I admire, including Jules Feiffer’s memoir, Backing Into Forward, and Martha Fay’s study of Feiffer’s life and work, Out of Line. Terry Gilliam published a wonderfully entertaining art book/autobiography last year, Gilliamesque: a pre-posthumous memoir (say the subtitle out loud; get it?), and I also read several books about him, Gilliam on Gilliam (interviews by Ian Christie) and The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the fight to the final cut by Jack Mathews.

THE ONES YOU HAVEN’T HEARD OF

I’ve chanced upon terrific “little” books that are unlikely to turn up on any bestseller list. Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, wrote a memoir called Do No Harm: stories of life, death, and brain surgery, in which he relates a moving and honest account of his screw-ups and regrets as much as his triumphs. The strange and fascinating life of James Tiptree, Jr.: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon, who went on African safaris with her family as a girl, worked for the CIA, and managed to convince everyone in the science-fiction community for years that her stories were written by a man, is an excellent bio by Julie Phillips.

Mary Louise Roberts gives a very different picture of the U.S. Army during a “good” war with What Soldiers Do: sex and the American GI in World War II France. There’s a lot in it about racism (on the part of the French as well as Americans), and the sexual use and abuse of “allies” and conquered people, plus the futile attempts of the U.S. military to teach, guide, compel, and cover up the behavior of its personnel.

I made my happy way through some of the unique novels by the 1998 Nobel Prize winner, José Saramago: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Cain, Blindness, Death With Interruptions, and fully intend to read more.

A STUNNING ARRAY OF TRUE STORIES

Svetlana Alexievich is a native of Belarus who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” according to the Nobel committee. It was the first time the prize had been awarded for nonfiction since Winston Churchill in 1953.

Her first book, War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face (1985), featured interviews with female veterans of the Soviet military during the Second World War -- from the women who cooked and laundered for the soldiers at the front to snipers, pilots, officers on tank and antiaircraft gun crews, and partisans who operated behind Nazi lines. In her second, Boys in Zinc (published in 1991 -- so titled because dead soldiers were shipped home in zinc-lined coffins), she offered stories from the Soviet Afghan War (1979-1989): disabled vets, widows, mothers, former officers, and surviving children talked about the devastating effects of “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.”

In 1997, Alexievich published Chernobyl Prayer, a self-portrait of the victims (small town folk, farmers), workers (firefighters, scientists, soldiers, hunters paid to kill all the animals), and children of the catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident in Ukraine. At least two of her books have yet to be translated into English: The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories (1993), which relates children’s memories of life during wartime, and Enchanted With Death (1993), accounts of the deluge of attempted and successful suicides after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Alexievich’s work is not just a compilation of eyewitness reports about what happened. She allows her interviewees to speak at length about their feelings: what it was like to undergo terrifying and cruel events, how people treated one another (for good and ill), and the way their experiences changed how they see their world and other people. Many of them cried while talking to her; you will, too.

THE CULMINATION OF A UNIQUE CAREER

But even “just” what happened can be astounding. Secondhand Time, the brand-new translation of Alexievich’s 2013 magnum opus, presents a painfully intimate as well as breathtakingly broad portrait of the lives that people lived (and suffered, inflicted on one another, and died) under the Communist regime that ruled most of the Asian continent as well a good chunk of Europe for 70 years. She talked to spies, torturers, generals, and war heroes along with grieving widows and mothers, homeless people, and frightened refugees.

A 35-year-old advertising manager in St. Petersburg talks about the amusements of the young Russian capitalists she dates, from jetting to New York for a Broadway opening to spending two nights locked in a Gulag prison cell, begging on the streets of Moscow (with their bodyguards watching from around the corner), and even hunting homeless people with a rifle after their quarry has been given a thousand dollars and told they can keep it IF they can elude their urban stalker.

The reader is made privy to the many ways in which individuals -- under the tremendous pressure of social, economic, racist, and government oppression -- betrayed one another, cared for one another, broke down, and soldiered on. Men and women told Alexievich secrets they’d never shared with anyone else: not even their wives or husbands, let alone their children. They confess to having done terrible things to other people, as well as witnessing acts of great goodness and evil. Former ardent members of the Communist Party yearn for the “good old days” when everything made sense (and you understand why they would!), or admit to their realization that it was all a horrid mistake.

THE EXTREMES

It’s not just Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians talking about fleeing the Nazis, surviving the Gulag, fighting in Afghanistan, feeling befuddled and angry about the “new capitalism” of the post-Soviet era, and protesting the same old power politics in the 1990s. She also talked to Azerbaijani refugees, Tajik aide workers, Russians who married Chechen Muslims for love and suffered persecution, denunciations, and violence not only from their neighbors but their own families for it.

When someone says “I used to live in a good, kind world, but it no longer exists, and it never will again,” or “There’s never been anything good in my life, not even some small thing,” you understand exactly why the speaker feels that way. A young woman suspects her mother is serially marrying and murdering husbands to survive and prosper, has had her skull fractured twice by her Afghan War veteran husband, relates how her sister was killed by her new husband in a drunken rage after ten days of marriage, and how their mother destroyed all her belongings so no one else could get them after her death.

On the other hand, veterans of the Afghan War speak of how beautiful that country was, and how much they miss the war because they’ve been treated so badly (when they’re noticed at all) back in Russia. And there are love stories so achingly gorgeous they’ll make you weep.

So this is indisputably the best book I’ve read this year.