More Books

Sweet Darusya

Followed a friend’s recommendation. It was difficult in the beginning because although I do not speak Ukrainian and even more so Hutsulian, I could still feel that the English translation lost a lot of language flavor, and I was frustrated not being able to grasp it. Still, I kept reading because since I first visited Bukovina in 1976, I had fallen in love with its people. Despite all Soviet propaganda, it was impossible not to see the level of oppression Hutsuls had experienced, and it was absolutely clear that their existence within the Soviet Union was not a happy ending to their struggles. I fell in love with the local legends. For many years, Oleksa Dovbush was my hero, and when other romanticized korsars and musketeers, I dreamed about opryshkes. I know what is drymba and what is kiptar, and how does Hutsul embroidery look.

After the initial “no, it doesn’t sound right!” I got all absorbed in the story: powerful, horrifying, and so beautifully written. I am not 100% sure whether those readers who knew nothing about the history of this region would love the book as much as I loved it, but I highly recommend it.

Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

It seems hardly possible to tell something new about Greek mythology, but Natalie Haynes succeeded in this endeavor. Focusing on female figures in Greek Myths, she conducted extensive research and presented the readers with many little-known facts. She also encourages the readers to think beyond what they learned in schools about the Greek Gods, and analyze the myths from today’s point of view on gender (in)equality

Eile Weisel: Night. Dawn. Day.

For some reason, Goodreads does not show the other two books of this trilogy, Dawn and Day. I believe they are often combined into a “Trilogy,” but I can’t find it either. I listened to the audiobooks, starting with Dawn and ending with Night. All three are not easy to listen to. They all talk about the long-term personality damage that does not end after a prisoner is liberated from the concentration camp, which I think is really important to understand. I just looked over the reviews of this book, and I see that most readers limit their reviews to one or two sentences, and that’s how I feel: it’s very difficult to write anything except for “horror” and “must-read”.

2 thoughts on “More Books

  1. Wow, I am surprised that you know so much about the Hutsuls! More than I know myself )). Honestly, I would never recommend Matios in translation as the key value of her books for me is in her rich and beautiful Ukrainian language rather than stories themselves, but I am glad that you still liked it. Thanks for feedback, this is interesting!

    As for Elie Wiesel, you just wrote the name incorrectly (it’s Elie Wiesel, not Eile Weisel) and somehow found the only erroneous entry on Goodreads. There all the possible editions of all Elie Wiesel’s books there.

    Like

  2. I can talk for hours (and I probably will blog about it when I reach this point on my timeline) how much I was fascinated with the history of Hitsuls, opryshki and Oleksa Dovbush. And how frustrated I used to be with a complete absence of any information anywhere back in the 70s. I went back on my own (with a friend) in 1983 to hear these stories from the local tour guides one more time, to walk the same paths, that time making sure nothing is lost on me. And I stood on the shore of the river Prut on the former border between Hungary and Romania, and I know how the villages were divided.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a reply to gremrien Cancel reply