Alexievich specialises in a genre she calls “novels in voices”, and like her books on the Afghan war and Chernobyl, this book too is a parade of people who describe in first-person what it was like to live through the fall of socialism, one of the most defining moments of our times. The Nobel Prize winner proves why she is one of the most significant writers today with this gut-wrenching whirlpool of a book that sucks you into the days just after the crumbling of the Soviet Union. Not just because it is the poignant story of a naive and brutal utopia that came undone, but because the stuff of Soviet Russia is so familiar - the fascination with perfumed soaps and tinned foods, with blue jeans and cosmetics - we knew these well in our pre-Liberalisation life.
Second-Hand Time, the latest of her books to be translated, is to relive those days.
I would open the newspaper with a sinking hollow in my stomach. Growing up in Calcutta in the 70s and 80s, when your father drove a two-door Standard Herald and one of the first dates you went on was to the AAEI Club to watchīattleship Potemkin, when the most delectable piece of clothing you owned was a sky-blue “foreign” nylon slip, and you read Russian fairytales from dirt-cheap books with beautiful drawings, you were likely to take the collapse of the USSR personally.
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