Andrey Kurkov brings clarity to the Ukraine invasion
"War and books are incompatible,” decided Andrey Kurkov, one month into Putin’s war against Ukraine. Reading his Diary of an Invasion, it’s not hard to see why he thinks so. Homes are evacuated; air raid sirens go off day and night. You get shelled. There is a never-ending cascade of bad news: about friends, about war crimes, about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The loss of luxuries. No tonic water, no whiskey-and-soda. There isn’t much time to think. Kurkov’s book came to the attention of the West when it was published in the UK last September. Since then, it has emerged as one of the first serious works of literature to come out of Ukraine since the invasion.
