[The Orphanage : A Novel] by [[Serhiy Zhadan]] (Ukraine, 2017, English translation 2021

March, Wartime, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Pasha is a relatively young high school teacher of Ukrainian. He shares an apartment with his father. His sister asks that Pasha to make a three day trek to pick up her son from the orphanage there (where she put him as she has a drug problem) Pasha is a good guy and leaves to get the kid.

Did I say this is in wartime? Pasha’s journey is not easy and he faces many challenges but he does make it to the orphanage and collects his 17-year nephew, (who he doesn’t really know, so they will get to know each other) and heads back with just enough juice in his cell phone for one phone call.
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This is a unusual book, and I think it requires flexibility from the reader. While reading this I thought of other books…other kinds of books i.e. ]post-apocalypse, madcap, epic …. I began to dog-ear page corners (gasp!)

Pasha’s journey reveals the absurdity and messiness of war, and yet, in some way the story is part bildungsroman, and or a hero’s journey. Wild and non-stop, but what a splendid, moving, crazy read. ( )

War in Ukraine (not the present one) a school teacher (who teaches Ukranian) goes to the city to collect his nephew who is at an orphanage. Beautifully written about a dark dank rotting subject: not just war, but urban war. It’s scary, gross, upsetting, but the first person monologue aspect of the book is very good, the disoriented way that memories of one’s life the sum of the parts gurgle up while going through all these other things. It all hits a sort of horrible apex and then the narrator switches suddenly to the young boy. The brief glimps into his perspective is sweet and lovely. Very sad, especially given the present state of Ukraine, but very moving too.

Ein Mann holt seinen Neffen aus einem Internat im Donbas, während um ihn herum der Krieg tobt. Entsetzlich, traurig und unter dem Aspekt, dass dort nun wieder Krieg herrscht, besonders bedrückend. ( )

Of course, I do not pretend to understand Ukraine, in any specific or detailed way. I suppose that in a general way, I understand that places that get in the news generally do not get there for being travel destinations or retreat locales; I suppose that, in the latter case, if you are really not afraid to live, to die, to be in pain, to go without, then the world is your parish— but in the more conventional sense of the former, places like Ukraine do not have, as a rule, the sort of things people would choose to have, and indeed you’d find there not so much the grand abstractions of conflict, as the trauma of war—only it wouldn’t sound so grand as it does, stated in the abstract.

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.

I think I checked this novel's publication date five times during the week I spent reading it. Published in 2017 -- long before the current Russian invasion and war. Reflective of some contemporaneous skirmishes but darker and I'd argue prophetic.

This is a difficult book to read. The details are sharp and vivid. The rendering of war claws at you. But it is worth reading to see one Ukrainian's take.

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. ( )