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A review by rickmanreader
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko
5.0
With all that's going on in Ukraine right now I wanted to read something that would help me understand the conflict. This novel was on a list created for that purpose. It was really long (760 p.), really wonderful, and one I can’t get out of my head. The plot revolves around 3 women: a contemporary tv journalist, Daryna, who becomes obsessed with finding out the story of a striking woman in a photo of 5 partisans taken during WWII; Vlada, Daryna’s artist friend who dies suspiciously in a car accident; and Olena, the woman in the photo, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who was killed in 1947 by Stalin’s secret police.
But it’s also about this:
That’s important because early on in the novel Daryna finds a note -- actually just a word -- in the margin of one of her father’s books that appears to be the key to understanding him, a man whose long and seemingly pointless “struggle against the system” eventually cost his family any kind of normalcy and him his life. He dies a broken forgotten man in his mid 40’s after years spent defending himself against the Soviet authorities false claims ... and after enforced time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis. But then Daryna comes upon that page in one her father's books with an underlined phrase: “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness” ... with this!!! handwritten in the margin.
I loved Zabuzhko's writing and, long as this novel was, it was truly a delight to be inside her head. When I hear news from Ukraine now it comes to me at a higher decibel because of the time spent with these characters. Really liked it.
But it’s also about this:
I have come to think that a person’s life is not so much, or rather is not just, the dramatically arched story with a handful of characters (parents, children, lovers, friends, and colleagues –anyone else?) that we pass on more or less in one piece to our descendants. It’s only from the outside that life looks like a narrative, or when viewed backwards through a pair of mental binoculars we put on when we have to fit ourselves into the small oculars of resumes, late-night kitchen confessions, and home-spun myths, trimming and shaping life into orderly eyefuls. When seen from the inside, life is an enormous, bottomless suitcase, stuffed with precisely such indeterminate bits and pieces, utterly useless for anyone other than its owner. A suitcase carried, irredeemably and forever, to the grave. Maybe a handful of odds and ends fall out along the way … so whenever I stumbled into one of those lost, disowned scraps I was filled with a vague but insistent shame of my inadequacy, as if this piece, this accidental survivor, contained the key – the lost secret code to the deep, subterranean core of the other person’s life – and now I have it, but I don’t know which door it unlocks or if such a door even exists. Pg. 20
That’s important because early on in the novel Daryna finds a note -- actually just a word -- in the margin of one of her father’s books that appears to be the key to understanding him, a man whose long and seemingly pointless “struggle against the system” eventually cost his family any kind of normalcy and him his life. He dies a broken forgotten man in his mid 40’s after years spent defending himself against the Soviet authorities false claims ... and after enforced time in a psychiatric clinic with a falsified diagnosis. But then Daryna comes upon that page in one her father's books with an underlined phrase: “Hamlet’s hesitation to act decisively in sight of triumphing evilness” ... with this!!! handwritten in the margin.
this!!!---a scribble in the margins, a bauble that slipped out of the suitcase---turned the binoculars for me. For an instant, as if a flash of lightning cut through the darkness, I saw a living soul and the strange thing was that it was the same father about whom I, against my best instincts, continued to feel ashamed ... to see him from the inside and recognize, in that flash, what it was that had driven him to the end, that had not permitted him to back off and make the single required concession that white was really black; his indomitable abhorrence of his own fear, the physiological mandate from his very healthy and apparently very proud soul ... to reject this fear that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA ... I could be proud of him. Pg.32
I loved Zabuzhko's writing and, long as this novel was, it was truly a delight to be inside her head. When I hear news from Ukraine now it comes to me at a higher decibel because of the time spent with these characters. Really liked it.