What I’m Reading Erik Kennedy
Ihave been doing a lot of ‘weighty issues’ reading lately, possibly because it feels like the world is being slowly crushed by various crises.
I figure that it’s impossible to understand the Russo-Ukrainian War without understanding the political and psychic wreckage left behind when the Soviet Union dissolved. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich, is an oral history of that difficult process.
A catastrophic plunge in life expectancy post-1991, mafiocracy, unspeakable ethnic violence: they’re all there in the stories of ordinary people. The barbarities of the current war emerge from this context.
I’ve also been reading Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan’s work, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. What We Live For, What We Die For, a selection of his poems in English, shows why he is one of Europe’s most lauded mid-career writers. He is from the Donbas, and to give you a measure of his powers, he is able to summarise eight years of separatist conflict in three lines: ‘Dog-eared phone book, / where all the local numbers / now have international codes.’
The next books in my to-read pile are a little less grim, but no less important. I’ve dipped into Oscar Upperton’s The Surgeon’s Brain, about transgender nineteenthcentury British Army doctor James Barry. I was totally sold when I heard Upperton read live last year and would follow him anywhere.
Jacqueline Riding’s Hogarth: Life in Progress, about my favourite ever English artist, is in the queue, too. For me, William Hogarth is great because he understood that more was more: he tried to cram as much of the eighteenth century into his pictures as he could, and no one escaped scrutiny or judgement. That’s an artistic practice to envy and learn from.