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Excited for the work but confused by the facility's area radiation maps containing curious and contradictory measurements, Valery sets out into the forests to set up some experiments. Whose only want is a sliver of a moment when the shadow they're talking to isn't just their own (though clutching a pillow fort in bed because he can't fall asleep from the sheer aloneness of everything is a whole new level). You will go back into the late 30s, with references to the evil Josef Mengele and his human twin studies during the Holocaust. We read about actual real life horrific things that have happened to actual real life people and we get that absolute deranged ending ? Being told to go first only ever meant a cell … Somehow, being asked politely to make that last step himself was worse than being thrown in.
Please shelve this book next to The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and all the other The X Lives of Y books. is Pulley expecting her readers to be actually invested in these Austen-esque weepy scenes between these two men who spend all their time feeling sorry for themselves for committing atrocities and never have an iota of tension with each other over their actions? Radiation experiments could discover ways to mitigate or even cure radiation poisoning, saving millions of lives if the US ever nukes the Soviet Union. Resovskaya briefs the scientists about the Lighthouse and why the area was intentionally exposed to radiation by the Soviet government in 1957: to study the effects it might have on an entire ecosystem. Because most of those people have no trade skills, so they’re assigned to general labour, which is usually mining, in minus sixty degrees, so they die.This one was based straight in science and real historical events, which is great for many reasons, but not when most of it are things I looked up myself as I got curious along the way and read up on on wikipedia, only to find the words repeated back to me later in her book, almost verbatim. A lot of things went a bright colour to warn you that they were poisonous, and it was helpful even of lakes to do the same thing. If anyone had told me I’d be mesmerized by a book about radiation and biochemistry and terms like curies, millicuries, plutonium and polonium, I’d have told them they were crazy. In 1963, in a Siberian prison, former nuclear specialist Valery Kolkhanov has mastered what it takes to survive: the right connections to the guards for access to food and cigarettes, the right pair of warm boots, and the right attitude toward the small pleasures of life so he won't go insane. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.
One aspect of The Half Life of Valery K that I found particularly striking was the presence/lack of gendered expectations. The Russian motto: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil or there will be deathly consequences.Varia is a lot more knowledgeable about Soviet life and customs ( here's her review), so she picked up on a LOT more historical inaccuracies than I did. While Chernobyl may be the first incident that comes to mind when someone thinks about nuclear disasters in the 20th century, this event actually had a precursor in the USSR: the "Kyshtym disaster" of 1957. Based on actual events and information, we follow Valery from the prison camp where he was committed to a secret town where he's to work with others studying the effects of radiation on plants and animals.
Immediately Valery was enfolded in the glorious smell of hot leather and vodka, and what must have been a dab of furniture polish inside the heater. I felt it was too trunkated at times, like I didn't have enough time with the characters to really feel any attachment to them. g. France winning the Napoleonic Wars leads to a despotic future where white slavery exists and the poor English people having to reinstate the good future where…. When characters travel outside of the Soviet Union to what Westerners might describe as "normal" middle-class life they are shocked by the idea that a woman would not have a job, that she would be content as a housewife, and that her husband would see this as his due.There is no later indication that Anna makes it out and, truthfully, Shenkov seems to forget all about it. And I was incredibly pissed off with how she just killed Anna and the kids off and we got almost no reaction from Shenkov other than 'yeah wives die, children die, things happen , strawberry and champagne blah blah' . You’d imagine that the scientist in him would be struggling with his humanitarian side to take advantage of this situation. It is based on real events — a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster and subsequent cover-up in rural Russia in 1957 — and fills in the blanks with a plot, and characters, that teeter between darkly plausible and science fictional (so far, so Soviet). This is a piece of fiction but based on some real places and activities and the danger is still looming .
how its only april, but i already know this book will make an appearance on my top 10 countdown in december.This is a minor theme, but it nonetheless throws an interesting light on gendered expectations that is visible because of cross-cultural differences. I could go on about why I love Pulley’s specific formula: her focus on small kindnesses in the face of immense cruelty and coldness; her masterful building of tension and suspense; the way she builds a relationship on the smallest, subtlest moments and gestures into something grand and beautiful and breathtaking; her penchant for really, really interesting historical settings; how all her books include adorably anthropomorphic animals (I am overjoyed to announce that we have another octopus in this book, his name is Albert and I love him). Kostya just moving on to a happily domestic life without any knowledge of whether his beloved children were even alive?
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