Book of the year. Right here. There will be none better.
A few months ago, Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’d never heard of her—not so unusual for me—saw her name in passing on the Russian, Central Asian, Afghanistan blogs I follow, thought, yeah, cool, woman winning for a change, didn’t really pause to read more until I saw Afghanistan mentioned, then found she’d written this: Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War.
Most of my reading on Afghanistan has been either pre-1978 coup and Soviet occupation or post that plus Taliban thrills (who were real money makers for analysts and pundits for about ten years until Da’esh came along). The decade of the proxy war, from which Afghanistan and the Middle East are still suffering, has been only the subject of two books I’ve read: Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89, and now Alexievich’s stunning Zinky Boys.
They’re called Zinky Boys because the teenage heroes come back from the land where the Soviet Union is certainly not waging a war in sealed zinc caskets to be buried at night without ceremony.
I can’t do justice to this work. A relentless, measured documentation of suffering, loss, lies, the devastation of a generation, of imperial arrogance and stupidity that brought about its own demise, that discarded used up and broken bodies barely older than children, and as those very same colonial nations now almost fifteen years into the most recent occupation and war in Afghanistan begin yet another barely disguised proxy war in Syria, after all the unending chaos Europe, the British, Americans and their fiefdoms have instigated from Hindu Kush to Maghreb, this is the history to read. This is what we have to look forward to, this is what we are complicit in. All of us. These are the same lies being told for a fifth decade. It’s all here. There’s nothing new to find in the current wars, there won’t be a different outcome this time.
The writing, voices of young soldiers, the wounded, mothers, nurses, officers, conscripted and volunteers, it’s a recital, a judgement. Through the pages of this slim book they become one, each story unique and individual, and each the same. I can’t praise the writing highly enough. It occurs to me the closest is one of Liao Yiwu’s works, maybe The Corpse Walker.
It was only because I saw Afghanistan mentioned that I paused. I’m not much of a Nobel Laureate fan, many of the awards are political choices, and of the authors I have read or have read about, very few are indeed of the brilliance the award is supposed to confer. Of the Chinese winners, Gao Xingjian has nothing on Liao Yiwu, and Mo Yan is rubbish, as a person and a writer. But occasionally—Samuel Beckett and Henri Bergson of the writers I know—politics or no, the author is that outstanding, their contributions unique. Svetlana Alexievich, who I so easily could have missed, is that, and is the equal of Beckett and Bergson. And if you’re not moved to anger and tears through these pages, if your dreams aren’t troubled, there’s no hope for you.
