--- title: Secondhand Time type: Book date: 2026-08-08 rating: 10 author: Svetlana Alexievich year: 2016 status: Finished image: secondhand-time.jpg tags: - book colorSortKey: [5, -16, 8] --- It is rare that I review a book before I finish it. Sometimes I do this with bad books that I have not completed — but that is what the Goodreads user base calls DNFing it, explicitly saying that I am not going to finish, and therefore am capital-D _done_ with it. I do it every so often with video games, too, where even if my interest in completing the thing end-to-end is waning, I still want to record my thoughts. And I feel comfortable with that because gaming is a different experience and mechanism than consuming literature. Books, generally speaking, are about the gestalt, and it is hard to opine on the full quality of one without knowing how it ends, and the feeling that comes over you when you close it and sit with your thoughts. A game, conversely, can be called a success if it entertains you meaningfully and deeply for some portion of time, even if you put it down while there is still content left to experience. So I am breaking with tradition here. I am talking about _Secondhand Time_, my favorite book of the year — a book that has taken me six months to get through and will probably take me another two or three to complete. And I am comfortable talking about it because, not unlike a video game, it has already offered me so, so much, that to delay doing so would be an exercise in unnecessary formality. _Secondhand Time_ is an oral history of the regions comprising the former USSR, compiled almost entirely from firsthand narrative: actual people recounting their past. It is sprawling and nonlinear. There are obvious messages the author is trying to communicate — but unless I am in for a rude awakening, there is going to be no denouement that deeply recontextualizes or reshapes everything that came before. You hear countless stories, repetitive and rhapsodic, from every possible walk of life, though almost all of these walks involve the scars and bruises left by war and revolution. The only unifying thread is sadness and bitterness — not nostalgia, though certainly some of these stories contain nostalgia, so much as the sense of a country weeping for all the pain it has gone through. It is a brutal and beautiful book. It has taken me a long time to read because, frankly, sometimes the brutality — the extremes of the human condition to which I have been so privileged to be largely ignorant — is too much to bear, and I need to wade back out into the shallows until I am ready to resume. --- This is an oral history. And at the time of this writing, _The Odyssey_ is the single biggest movie event of the year — _The Odyssey_ being a book that is the writing-down of a story told from person to person over many, many years. And that story, too, is about a man who primarily tells stories: to kings and gods and everyone he encounters, sometimes for good effect and sometimes for ill. I am drawn to the comparison despite these two books sharing little to nothing with one another. Let me give you one example. One of the early stories in the book is about Sashka, a man who burned himself alive in the vegetable patch he owned outside a barracks — a suicide, to escape the pain of his daily drudgery. The story is told to us through by the author, recording faithfully the words of Sashka's friend and neighbor in the barracks. That neighbor spends her time on the page filling it with wild digressions that the author clearly found fascinating enough to include, and she was right to. One of these digressions is about the neighbor's mother, and the time the Germans occupied their remote farm town. In the span of a single afternoon, they shot every single Jew in the whole town. Except — the speaker tells us — two frightened and clever little boys, eight and ten years old, hiding out in a neighbor's barn. Her mother, one of the few in on the secret, was tasked with bringing these precious children a little milk in the dead of night whenever she could. But because in such stories there is always a turn, after a week or two she awoke to the screech of three German motorcycles pulling up to the barn. Someone else, it appears, had told a story — had informed on the barn's owner, fabulizing in the process, saying it was not just two boys but an entire dozen of Jews hiding. The two boys were shot immediately. And the neighbor, for all their bravery and trouble, was tied to one of the motorcycles and forced to run alongside it until their heart burst. --- I think, right now, for one reason or another, I am drawn to things that try (in vain, with honor) to evoke the sheer depth and breadth of the human experience. [[Ducks, Newburyport]] was the last book that took my breath away in quite this sense — a feeling that can only be described as _transportative_, a sense not of enchantment but of teleportation. It is a blessing to get to read something like this. It also requires not just fortitude but reflection; I have put down this book for an afternoon and felt myself so compelled by what I was reading that I knew I had to start writing about it. This is not an obscure book. The author won the Nobel Prize. And yet I have never heard anyone discuss it. Perhaps this is due to its peculiarity — its sitting outside the easy confines of genre, neither a traditional history nor traditional fiction by any means. Perhaps partially due to it being a Russian work, though it must be said that the English translation is masterful. Perhaps due to the book simply being uncomfortable and unapproachable. The stories of triumph and victory, rare and fleeting as they are, always arrive as either a prologue or an epilogue — which is perhaps the most honest way to think about the human condition. Narratives ought to impose a clean chronology on events: a rising action, a falling action, a denouement. But this is never how the world works. And to the extent that we can feel comfortable with the illusion — whether in our media or in our day-to-day lives — that comfort is equal parts blessing and willful ignorance, handed to us by many people, almost all of whom died and suffered in life, whether on the battlefield or in the factory line.