(Book Review)

This book is about Ukrainian society: past and present, about betrayal and victory, about struggle and hope for victory. I am glad that I read it right now, because it leaves me with the confidence that one day everything will definitely be fine and each of us has the opportunity to somehow influence the future to be better than the present.

A lot of interesting ideas are discussed in the ‘Museum of Abandoned Secrets.’ I do not agree with all of them, but something tells me that the author planned that the readers would have a dialogue with the book and draw their own conclusions.

The highlight of the book is the author’s language. It is colorful, so much so that for the first time in a long time I read a work of fiction with a dictionary (I had no idea how much I missed it!). Another feature of the author’s style is long, very poetic sentences that immerse you in yourself and make you slowly float through the plot, like a geyser along the current of a warm river. Thanks to this, the effect of complete immersion in the inner state of the characters is created. To better understand what I’m talking about, just read the first two sentences of the novel.

“Then it’s the photo’s turn. Black and white, faded to the color of sepia, caramel brown, some on thick, embossed, like a wafer, photo paper with white teeth on the edges, similar to the netting on the collar of a school uniform – the pre-Kodak era, the era of the Cold War and domestic photographic materials, as well as in general, everything domestic, but the women in the pictures are decorated with the same high buns of chignons, these stupid linings made of dead (and not once, perhaps, and someone else’s, fe, what an abomination!) hair, and dressed in the same irregular rectangular, bast looking like a dress, like the ladies in Andy Warhol’s movies or, say, Anouk Eme in “81/2” (at least they could see this one at least theoretically, they could withstand the five-hour queue in the festival crowd and still break through to the hall, wet and happy, with their hair tied back and multicolored and dark horseshoes under their armpits on white nylon blouses, under which colored underwear was worn – domestic, of course, which one had the best: blue, pink, lilac, but the underwear is not visible in the photo, and those damp horseshoes, nor the smell of those queues – not yet familiar with deodorants, but stiflingly powdered with loose white and lipstick, scented with some ‘Indian sandalwood,’ f-ky ‘Red Moscow’ or, at best, the Polish, equally sickeningly sweet ‘Byc moze…’ on a diverse coral background steamed women’s sweat, no one will restore it – and in the pictures, disheveled and freshly combed, they completely pass for Anouk Eme’s contemporaries, not a single iron curtain, can be seen from here, from a distance of forty years…”

I don’t know if I should recommend this particular book, because the author’s style is very unusual, and the book consists of as many as 832 pages, but I definitely recommend reading Oksana Zabuzhko’s short prose (she has a lot of stories.) and if you like it, feel free and take ‘Museum of Abandoned Secrets!’ I promise you won’t regret it!

My rating: 9 new words out of 10 pregnant women.