Child of Chernobyl
Scott Stambach’s Ala/yalsa Alex Award winning novel The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (2016) is about the second generation of victims of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986: the children who were born with serious defects that were caused by the radiation that spread across much of Eastern Europe. When we meet Ivan, it is late autumn in 2005 and he is a seventeen year old patient at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in southern Belarus. It would be more accurate to describe him as an inmate, since he is not being treated for any of his problems and his presence at the hospital is more of a custodial situation. He has no family that he knows of and his disabilities prevent him from living on his own.
Ivan has no legs, only a pair of what he describes as nubs. The same is true for one arm. His other arm is half the length of a normal arm. It has no hand, but he does have three fingers at the end of this half arm. He has a wheelchair which he can clamber into with some difficulty and can propel with his partial limb. Out of the chair, he has to writhe across the floor to move anywhere. Dressing or undressing himself is also an exercise in wriggling and twisting to get a shirt or shorts on or off.
Ivan is in the process of binge writing on a computer the book we are reading. He has been a voracious reader for several years, but this is his first attempt to do any serious writing. He will be at it for more than three days. For a beginner, he writes very well. The book is both easy to read and hard to read: easy, because it is written simply and clearly; hard, because the content is so painful and unpleasant.
The first half of this book is a description of the hospital and the people in it. Ivan knows a few long term patients, the medical staff and the administrative staff. He doesn’t bother to learn who most of the other patients are because he knows they will not live long enough to make it worth his while to invest the time and energy to get to know them. In fact, it is a point of pride with Ivan to be able to distinguish by their symptoms which of the newcomers will last three months and which will last six months.
Ivan has no use for the doctors who are assigned to him, who are primarily psychologists or psychiatrists. He is convinced that they all have more serious mental health issues than he does, and their efforts to treat him are really just attempts to come to grips with their own problems. As a result, most of his interactions are with the nurses and the administrative staff, including the Director. Ivan is convinced that the latter is not only incompetent and corrupt, but also evil.
Ivan’s days consist mostly of eating and sleeping, masturbating and watching television. He does some reading when one of the nurses can find a book that interests him. Ivan’s routine gets interrupted by a new arrival: Polina Pushkin. She is also a teenager and she has leukemia; she has been sent to this hospital for chemotherapy. Ivan resents her presence at first because she not only challenges his favoured position with the nurses, but because she is a fighter and refuses to accept the status quo within the hospital, Polina is able to learn things about Ivan that he thought were impossible to unearth. As her condition worsens, a strong bond builds between the two and she encourages Ivan to seek a life outside the hospital. The second half of the book is a countdown to Polina’s death. It reads more like a diary than the autobiography of the first half. It is both hopeful and depressing at the same time.
Author Scott Stambach is a teacher of physics and astronomy in San Diego. The book includes an interview which explains why he became a writer and a list of the books he admires the most. It might be worth reading just to get his list of recommendations, the only ones of which I have read are Lolita and 100 Years of Solitude.
-Vince Cuddihy
The Lennoxville Library is continuing the TD Summer Reading Club sessions on Thursday evening from 6pm to 8pm, and Saturday morning from 10 until noon.