374. Chernobyl Prayer

Never during the entire book does the author address the reader directly. She isn’t trying to explain anything, let alone convince the reader about anything – be it then the dangers of nuclear power or the corruption of Soviet authorities or the hollowness of the Communist system. She is just making sure the voices of Chernobyl people are heard. And the readers can judge for themselves. 

Chernobyl prayer is a unique type of non-fiction and I found it tricky to classify*. It is autobiographical in the sense that tens of the tragedy’s victims are telling their stories and sharing their experiences – but it has a very wide breadth of voices for it to be conventionally biographical. Moreover, the book cannot be neatly classified as expository either as there wasn’t any editorial guidance for the reader to classify as the book as informative, explanatory or argumentative.

This unique approach had its fair share of shortcomings (Explaining the gap between my subjective and objective scores) –

1. Unclear structure: The countless worthy-to-be-heard voices that the narrator shares are put in a format that I didn’t find discernible. And was occasionally repetitive.
2. Ommisions: The book covers a wide breath of voices of people impacted by Chernobyl – but never explains which were chosen and why or why not?
3. Lack of context: While we hear the voices of several groups of peoples – firefighters, clean-up workers, scientists etc. we never really get a proportion of people affected.
   At least in once cases, one of the victims of the tragedy, possibly from an honest belief, made a claim which might not be scientifically robust. While existence of such beliefs is a fact, the author/editor can always add context – even as footnotes to prevent inaccurate impressions for the readers.