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A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine"A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet's sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country's devastation and its people's passionate determination to survive."-Publishers Weekly, starred review Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.… (more)
User reviews
This is a difficult book to read. The details are
Pasha is a teacher who must travel through the military checkpoints of a rapidly exacerbating war to reach an orphanage and retrieve his nephew. Pasha's town was once a typical one; his career was once a rewarding one; his family was once a normal one. Now there's a war that worsens by the day and a journey through the hellscape of modern warfare.
I suppose, more specifically that in The Orphanage we find an awkward war story, you know. It’s not like some 1940s-themed story, where everyone is patriotic and informed, and the men are capable and confident, and the women trust the men, and the children are good little victims and good students, and when people are in trouble, it’s because they got shot or got captured, heroically, probably, or at least with great flair. In Serhiy’s story, if people are reading it is probably some middlebrow British or American novel, probably in Russian translation, and generally they don’t read, or get informed or involved, or care about their job, even if they’re a teacher or whatever, and so on down the list.
It’s an awkward war story. I’d say it’s for an awkward time, although I suppose there was a fiasco or two in the forties, too. —Never an honest word, ah, but that was when I ruled the world.
…. And, yes, I finished this on Christmas Eve. I finish a lot of books, so some of them get finished on funny dates. (Though of course a holiday is often the opposite of a holy-day, in actual fact; it’s a day we tell God and the rules to go shove out, and perhaps wake up to reality again a week later.) I did read a seasonal devotional this year for Christmas, (Advent with Our Lady of Fatima), and a collection of Dickens Christmas novellas, and incidentally I guess tomorrow (I watch movies in stages, like books) I’ll finish watching “Father Goose” and finish up a Ralph Nelson collection, (one movie isn’t long enough to be a book), that film being incidentally a bit like a sort of “coastal Christmas” type of vibe. I don’t object to it, as such—inherently, you know.
But the world does not stop and become more artificial and conventional for however long because of Christmas. (Possibly, it becomes even more crazed.) And although I do not Love To Read News Articles the way some people do, certainly I know that many people in world suffer, and many of them are Ukrainian.
I suppose sometimes the world does not ask us out permission before hitting the Not Easy button, even if we are over-polite, right.