Like Thomas Merton’s nuclear weapon poems composed
entirely of newspaper quotes, the book works by accretion and irrefutability of
the media evidence. The story of the three sisters is helpful – more helpful
for non-Russians, who desire to know what the Russians really think (and how)
of the Chernobyl accident – yet the story does not tell us anything deeper. How
deep do we want to go? Recognisable types, individuals, caught off-guard by the
disaster everyone has secretly known was “a matter of time” and which, when it
happened, would be “a sign of the times.” The story is there to help the reader
reassess the large segments of Pravda &c. quotes set between each chapter,
and it is those which anyone literate in the disaster will find more disturbing
than the story itself. The dialogue is shoddy (the translator?) yet the force
of circumstance around which it revolves gives it an excuse. The conversation
at the expense of the Party sounds like a genre unique to the modern Russian
condition: imagine what it must be like when the samizdat get satirical. All
the time, too. We think of ‘Stalker’ (Andrei Tarkovsky), the three men going
into The Zone, and what to find? Although this book has none of the hypnotic
character of that film, we can hear the click-click of the train carrier moving
inexorably into the unknown as each page is turned.
Entry in Notebooks, 16th July
1989
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