Compared to other ways of writing history, oral history is often complicated by the absence a single narrative vision to guide the reader's sense of which observers are most worth attention, and how their observations combine into "The Truth." When historical subjects are allowed to speak for themselves, it is more difficult to assuage the confusion and contradiction, which, while organic parts of human experience, are often erased in the recounting. Frustrating as all this may be for those seeking a clear summary of events, oral history allows us to hear from voices traditionally ignored, suppressed, or edited into agreement with historians who claim to speak for them.

Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, translated by Keith Gessen, demonstrates the genre at its most effective, tempering the confusion of multiple narrators with a thoughtful ordering of accounts provided by dozens of diverse observers. Nor does the book betray an editorial or political agenda, allowing those impacted by Chernobyl to speak for themselves after years of being spoken for only by others.

When it occurred in 1986, the catastrophe was immediately misrepresented by the Soviet state as a minor disruption easily controlled and with little or no lasting consequences. As these collected interviews--presented as monologues--make readily apparent, this was (and is) hardly the case. One subject recalls,

They suddenly started having these segments on television, like: an old lady milks her cow, pours the milk into a can, the reporter comes over with a military dosimeter, measures it. And the commentator says, See, everything's fine, and the reactor is just ten kilometers away... The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident...

This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

Even at the mundane level of milk production--perhaps most importantly at this level, since so many of these informants are understandably most concerned with the loss of their crops, livestock, and land--the realities of the disaster are inseparable from the lies told about it. Alexievich's subjects speak from within the contexts of their own observations but also through the official narratives they have been given with which to understand Chernobyl. Many of those interviewed seem to be actively making of sense of what happened to them a decade earlier even as they tell their stories, and the reader is made aware of this ongoing process through a wise authorial choice to leave the speakers' false starts, digressions, self-conscious utterances, and occasionally aggressive reactions to the presence of the interviewer intact.

As chapter follows chapter and informant follows informant, they become a chorus in which it is difficult to distinguish one voice from another. This effect seems intended, as several of the chapters bear titles like "Children's Chorus" and string together comments from multiple interviews without differentiating the speakers. While this swirl of voices, and the stark horror of the stories they tell, quickly become overwhelming, and while many of those stories bear great similarities to one another, there is never a sense of redundancy. Each shared experience is a reminder that these are a small sampling of the lives impacted and that there are many more voices from this disaster, and from so many others throughout history and around the world, who are still unable to speak for themselves, making work like Alexievich's all the more vital and making Voices from Chernobyl all the more difficult yet important to read.