Comment (1)

• Having been reduced to skip reading to get through the 470 pages of transcribed recorded interviews that make up Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, I was eager to read Miriam Cosic’s review of The Unwomanly Face of War to get a professional critic’s explanation for the Nobel Prize in Literature, to which, as she reports, “the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment”. But rather than enlightenment, Cosic refers to the familiar shortcomings- “barely edited”... “without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant.”…
  Miriam Cosic does suggest there might be an explanation for awarding this prize in literature to a “kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian”- the first non fiction, she might have pointed out, since Churchill in 1953- “The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin”. And if she wasn’t so hostile to Putin’s Russia, Cosic would have followed this up.
  Alexievich has no popular following in Russia. By contrast, previous Russian winners of the literature Nobel— Bunin, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov—are
  still household names. She is regarded as an ethnic Ukrainian with Belarusian citizenship writing in the Russian language, whose output consists mainly of poorly disguised political polemics.
  Posted by L.J Louis

  20 November 2017