I’m not vegetarian – although I don’t eat a lot of dairy, and I don’t particularly like the meat industry. Still, the narrator’s lips are taut against ready-to-bare teeth – she has an unwavering commitment to expanding the realities of life on earth and the complicated relationship between man and nature. He recently published, together with Sven Vitse, Affectieve crisis, literair herstel: De romans van de millenialgeneratie (2021; Amsterdam University Press) [Affective Crisis, Literary Repair: The Novels of the Millennials], a study of twenty-first-century literature from the perspective of an affective crisis.

I found another, shorter film about wildlife in the Exclusion Zone, in which an ecologist spoke to National Geographic about this condition. Rich and unflinching, this writing expands our sense of what it means to live, as we do, in a time of crisis. There is something dissociative about a description of war as chains of interactions between beings and forces, rather than as the exclusively human story of nations and disagreements. He wasn’t sentimental, noting coolly that while life on Earth is resilient, the human species may, or may not, survive.After they left, the footage showed spider crabs and rock crabs creeping out over the corpse, which had, in the still water, taken on a strangely woolly appearance. They had an entirely different understanding of death, encompassing everything: from the birds to the butterflies. DH: I’m working on a novel that holds whole (fictional) biographies, to think about how life rises and falls and is shaped from birth to death, collecting different experiences of place and time. Chernobyl has been here since 1986, it is here today, and it will extend into the deep future, long after Alexievich and all her subjects and all her readers have gone.

She pushed and cajoled her way into the building, and inside she found Geiger counters “going berserk.But despite my admiration for the chains of renewing energy, a part of me didn’t want to watch the whale’s majestic body being parceled out in units the size of a worm’s bite. It can feel impossible, as an individual, to decelerate or exit the systems that make all this happen. This mode of attention is not an encounter between “event and sense,” but “an encounter with something that is both present and absent,” a tool for listening to silence. Perhaps the most disturbing detail in Chernobyl Prayer wasn’t the execution of innocent pets, nor the peeling of a young man’s skin, but the fact that so many of Alexievich’s interlocutors described the experience of nothing—the lack of experience altogether.

I sat outside the hutch and waited for them to be revealed when their mother rolled aside – tiny pink squirming things which were in the process of becoming, from day to day, delicate versions of their parents. If it’s hard to see these particular forms of violence then of course it’s also hard to feel that they are a part of our realities or relationships, or to make changes. And yet, he describes this devastation only glancingly, in generic terms (a town is “badly damaged”), or in brief glimpses (trees in a wood near Aachen have suffered “decapitation”).I can understand why you would dislike language on these terms, but personally, I’ve never been able to feel it. When I started writing Emergency, something had been troubling me about the novels I was reading and their way of inhabiting the world.

And in terms of the power of your own language, if someone were to read Emergency , is there one thing you’d want them to take away from it? He includes a grainy photograph of charred black forms on cobblestones, and he also mentions that the lilac and chestnut trees had a second flowering in the spring of 1943. When they were a week or so old, skin still visible through a sheen of black fur, my mother explained why I wasn’t to touch them: the rabbit would eat her babies if they had a strange smell on them. Alexievich’s book begins with an extraordinary narrative that is both a passionate love story and a detailed pathology of radiation poisoning.The book is an oral history of the infamous nuclear disaster of 1986, as told to the author by survivors.