The newest Nobel Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, is more of a journalist than anything else, which raises a significant question as to the meaning of “literature.”
Last weekend’s “Financial Times” published a piece written by her that approaches an answer. Since there is no one version of what is true, all narratives are essentially fiction, unequivocally literary and symbolic.
The text above is a tiny sample of Alexievich’s forceful, condensed writing. And the meaning with which she loads every very real word.