Publisher's Synopsis
De la Premio Nobel de Literatura 2015, una obra maestra inédita hasta ahora que recoge el recuerdo de los niños que sobrevivieron a la segunda guerra mundial. Un tema de gran interés desde una perspectiva totalmente distinta.
La Segunda Guerra Mundial dejó casi trece millones de niños muertos y, en 1945, solo en Bielorrusia, vivìan en los orfanatos unos veintisiete mil huérfanos, resultado de la devastación producida por la guerra en la población de ese paìs. A finales de los años ochenta la Premio Nobel Svetlana Alexiévich entrevistó a aquellos huérfanos y compuso con sus testimonios un emocionante relato de una de las mayores tragedias de la historia.
Esta obra maestra inédita constituye un retrato personal y profundamente conmovedor del conflicto en el que la propia autora no interviene más allá del prólogo: son sus protagonistas los que hablan conformando con sus palabras una especie de memoria coral de la guerra, original, auténtica y fascinante.
&«[...] por su escritura polifónica, que es un monumento al valor y al sufrimiento en nuestro tiempo.», palabras del Jurado de la Academia Sueca al otorgar a la autora el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2015.
&«Me dedico a la historia omitida, las huellas imperceptibles de nuestro paso por la tierra y por el tiempo. Recojo la cotidianidad de los sentimientos, los pensamientos y las palabras. Intento captar la vida cotidiana del alma.»
Svetlana Alexiévich
Reseña:
&«Alexiévich lleva más de treinta años luchando con censores y tiranos para dar voz a los sin voz.»
Felipe Sahagún, El Cultural de El Mundo
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER; The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature-a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre," describing her work as "a history of emotions-a history of the soul." Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it's like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres-but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.
A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. "Through the voices of those who confided in her," The Nation writes, "Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil-in a word, about ourselves."
Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time
"Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. . . . Alexievich's tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace."-The Wall Street Journal
"Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people."-The New York Times
"There's been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as Secondhand Timesince Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as necessary and overdue. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today's dictatorships, that matters."-The Christian Science Monitor
"[Alexievich's] longest and most ambitious project to date: an effort to use an oral history of the nineties to understand Soviet and post-Soviet identity."-The New Yorker
"In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century."-J. M. Coetzee
