What do you mean? War is a great help for us. It provides us distraction from ourselves. It absolves us from seeing ourselves close up. It's been some time now that we've been peeking into ourselves through war only.
In one story from Ukrainian writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets' Lucky Breaks, "The Transformations," a woman named Olga makes things transform: a pot of kasha becomes a flower; a tablespoon becomes an Easter egg. Sometimes Olga transforms objects intentionally and sometimes by accident, sometimes her powers fail her. These transformations have something to do with Kyiv in the summer months, when it "empties out"; Kyiv, too, is liable to be transformed. Are Olga's transformations merely a kind of change, or a disappearance--what happened to the kasha and the tablespoon anyway? Are they gone, or merely different? Could Olga's transformations represent the power of war to transfigure and erase--the war that rages in the distant provinces of Donbas and Donetsk? Or might we read Olga's powers as a hopeful gesture, of an incipient ability to make the world into what one wishes?
As Brent noted in his review, Lucky Breaks is all about disappearances, about refugees. Women disappear from their jobs and then reappear later as if nothing is happened; they are taken away because they are found standing in the middle of street screaming. The grand motions of war and dispossession, for Beloruts, find expression in small things: the discarded umbrella that a woman chastises as if it were a person, the mitts of the witch who catches babies in them, and who works other kinds of evil magic on her small town. Nearly all of the characters are women, and they live small women's lives. They are cosmetologists and florists, and the pointed ordinariness of their lives is not erased by the emergence of small and fantastic things, curses and omens, bits of magical realism that reflect, perhaps, the strangeness of life during wartime.
To be honest, I didn't connect much with Lucky Breaks. I liked a few of the stories, like "The Transformations," and another about a perpetually sick woman who is unable to handle the stress of being suddenly and consistently well. Others were enigmatic, too shapeless or slight, to hold my attention, but if I'm telling the truth, I probably ought to have read them at a time when I was feeling less sleepy. The photographs that appear throughout its pages connected for me not at all. More knowledge of the specifics of the war in Ukraine might have helped, too, but there is still quite a power in seeing the familiar names of the nightly news--Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia--emerge as real places from which real people emerge, or disappear.
This is the first book I've ever read from Ukraine--which brings my "countries read" list up to 74.
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