SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH:
SECOND-HAND TIME

Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions
English
704 pages
13 × 19.5 cm
Softcover
ISBN 9781910695418

Price: 90 lei


Second-hand Time is the latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Here she brings together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble. Fashioning a singular, polyphonic literary form by combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, Alexievich creates a magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society out of the stories of ordinary women and men.

‘Second-Hand Time is [Alexievich’s] most ambitious work: many women and a few men talk about the loss of the Soviet idea, the post-Soviet ethnic wars, the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects of the Soviet experience. ... Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the world’s deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition.’
— Masha Gessen, New Yorker

‘The people she talks to, the co-authors of her books, are working people, women and elderly people – precisely those who are left behind. … Alexievich’s voices are those of the people no one cares about, but the ones whose lives constitute the vast majority of what history actually is. … This is history, major history, but written, as all history should be, from below.’
— Keith Gessen, Guardian

‘Alexievich’s work follows the strands of thought and emotion wherever her voices take her – through nightmares, but also flashes of joy … The work is unique in the intimacy of the experience transmitted through the writing: which is, after all, only the ability to have a human ear, to listen, and to publish.’
— John Lloyd, Financial Times

‘For both the author and the reader, this landmark novel is a way to make sense of the dramatic changes that defined life in the Soviet and post-Soviet world.’
— Calvert Journal