ATOMIC ANNA by Rachel Barenbaum

ATOMIC ANNA

Barenbaum, Rachel Grand Central Publishing (448 pp.) $28.00 | April 5, 2022 978-1-5387-3486-5

A Soviet scientist responsible for the Chernobyl disaster invents a time machine so she can change not only that fatal accident, but also her own destiny. Anna Berkova grew up applying her brilliant scientific and mathematical brain to questions of nuclear power. A star of the Soviet Union, she designed the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, taking care to work through numerous safety protocols. Of course, it’s not enough, and when the reactor melts down on April 26, 1986, her life is only saved by an accidental jump through time. She finds herself in 1992, on top of a mountain, holding a bleeding woman who claims to be the daughter she gave away as an infant and who tells Anna she must use her time-traveling power both to stop Chernobyl and save her own granddaughter. From this striking, emotional beginning—which gives rise to a thousand questions—the novel follows three generations of Anna’s family, itself jumping around in time to explore the lives of Anna, her daughter, Molly, and her granddaughter, Raisa. All three struggle to find their places in the world as talented, strong, independent women, and all three will play a pivotal role in Anna’s quest to change the future—or is it the past?—not only to protect those who perish in the nuclear disaster, but to empower, and ultimately save the lives of, her family. In Barenbaum’s skillful hands, a complex concept and structure work beautifully, as the novel is slowly constructed one painstakingly detailed chapter at a time. The book is an incredible achievement with a heartfelt human theme: It’s never too late to let go of psychological baggage and heal past wounds.

As ambitious as a Greek tragedy and just as lyrical and unflinching.

LUCKY BREAKS

Belorusets, Yevgenia Trans. by Eugene Ostashevsky New Directions (160 pp.) $14.95 paper | March 1, 2022 978-0-8112-2984-5

A debut collection depicting women who live on the margins of Ukrainian society. “I’ve never felt a sense of security in Ukraine,” explains the narrator of one story. “It wasn’t safe for a girl or woman there.” Indeed, a sense of unease pervades every corner of this book, which spotlights women affected directly and indirectly by the violence in Eastern Ukraine. (The contours of the conflict are anything but straightforward: “Russia is waging war against Ukraine;

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Ukraine is waging war against an internal enemy…people say that Europe is also waging some kind of war here.”) In a series of narrative portraits, readers are introduced to a witch who delivers a town’s babies using an enormous mitt, years later wordlessly compelling them to do her bidding (“The Woman Who Caught Babies Into a Mitt”); to a woman who lives in a damp room, “bursting with health, so much so that she no longer felt human,” and prays desperately for illness (“The Woman Who Fell Sick”); and, in the acerbically ironic “The Woman Who Could Not Walk,” to a protagonist whose “perfidious feet” betray her and stop moving amid a crowded street on International Women’s Day. Some stories adopt an overtly symbolic register, like the darkly humorous “The Stars,” in which a weekly horoscope informs townspeople when it’s safe to venture outside and when they should “seek seclusion and privacy” from the shellings above. Some are masterfully imbued with a sense of loss—such as “The Florist,” in which a woman as beautiful as her flowers disappears without explanation, presumably “into the fields and joined the partisans.” Though the stories’ brevity occasionally dissatisfies, it also renders each one precious—like a gut punch, full of simple observations that quickly become devastating. Belorusets, who came to fiction from photojournalism (her own images appear in the book), excels at building stories that serve as striking snapshots of lives—strange, beautiful, and absent the interpretative context that might render them neater and less unsettling. As it is, this singular collection brings Ukraine, “the land of residual phenomena,” entirely to life.

Striking and original.