The Museum Of Abandoned Secrets

People often forget the evil they've done unto others, but retain forever the antipathy toward those they've wronged - reasons for this are found and fit into the puzzle later, retroactively.

Don't ask me to write a fair review of this. I can't. Yes, that's a standard cop-out and all, but in this case it also happens to be true; partly because I'm just bowled over by it, but also because it's the kind of novel (I could say Joyce, Morrison, Cartarescu, etc) that's so steeped in language, history and experiences I can only learn of, but not know. I feel like a fraud talking too much about it, being so overwhelmed by it.

She is lucky: she is "insane", and it's hereditary.

Then again, that's part of the story, too. Which is deliciously simple on the surface, to give Zabuzhko the chance to dig into all the complexities underneath. The TV journalist Daryna Goshchynska, the daughter of a dissident who died in a a mental hospital and now living in early-00s Ukraine, wants to make a documentary on a woman who fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the late 40s (you thought WWII ended in 1945, didn't you?), and just happens to be her boyfriend's great aunt. So when she starts digging in the story, he starts dreaming of it... except the dreams get more vivid with every night, and both Adrian and Daryna find themselves . And so we get a story set both in the newly-independent Ukraine, with its growing corruption (or inherited, if it makes a difference) where dollars can buy anything, no ideas but blind nationalism carry any weight, and TV channels air So You Think You Can Become A Pornstar; and in 1940s Ukraine, amid guerilla warfare and Stalinist purges, where people who went missing get to tell their story. There are so many secrets buried in the Ukraine, so many mass graves, so many things that have never been spoken about, so many records that have been burnt. Zabuzhko nests stories within stories within stories, to uncover all the layers of history that have been hidden, unpersoned, both to the characters and to the readers.

And we comforted ourselves with "manuscripts don't burn."

Oh, but they do burn. And cannot be restored.

Our entire culture is built on faulty foundations. The history we are taught is nothing but the clamor-increasingly deafening and difficult to disentangle-of voices out-yelling each other: I am! I am! I am! I, so and so, did this and that-and so on, ad infinitum. But the voices resound over burnt-out voids-over the silence of those who've been robbed of their chance to cry out, I am! Over those who had their mouths gagged, their throats slashed, their manuscripts burned. We don't know how to hear their silence; we live as if they never existed. But they did. And their silence, too, is the stuff of which our lives are made.

Goodbye, Daddy. Forgive me, Daddy.

I won't claim to love it unreservedly, there are things in it that make me want to argue with it, much like I do with Dostoevsky; the romanticized view of the nationalist uprising (which isn't surprising since it's told from their perspective), even if it's contrasted with, well, Stalin, isn't entirely unproblematic even if its modern version gets examined a lot more closely. The translation, while mostly good, is occasionally a bit too americanized (I might be wrong, but I don't think "drank the purple Kool-Aid" is a Ukrainian expression). But fuck that. Really. Zabuzhko is so completely in control of this uncontrollable story that just grows with every chapter, with every new narrator or perspective introduced, unravelling all the ways history - whether mandated by the government, muttered by drunk uncles, or written in the blood of someone who never knew their biological parents - echo in everything, from official or inofficial power structures to a lover's touch, in all the justifications we learn by rote and repeat until we actually believe they constitute reality.

What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but given to you anew every minute-all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other's sentences-"that's just it, exactly, that's what I just thought"-thrilling us as if we'd just found a secret door in a shared home, but I bet had we tried to write out our individual trains of thought, separately, and then compared notes, we'd see we weren't thinking the same thing at all-only about the same thing.

I just want to quote this book forever, if nothing else to show that it's not as dry and analytical as the "history of power bla bla". Quite the contrary; it's a book shot through by love stories, some unrequited and buried and forgotten for decades, some very much alive. Genetic material is history too, chosen families are blood too. Language - Ukrainian resurrected in competition with Russian, only for both to be supplanted by English - the words you choose to use; while she doesn't try to be Joyce in any way, Zabuzhko has that same perfect ear for language, making every character voice echo their history and hint at their future. Which, despite it all, there is one. All of this has to lead somewhere.

You can't keep raping reality with impunity; sooner or later it will take its revenge, and the later it comes, the more terrifying it will be.

Hello, then. Who are you?