Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy

Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy
Buy Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Autobiography
Reviewer: Patricia Duffaud
Summary: An intelligent and funny memoir that takes us from Belgrade to London.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 256	Date: February 2015
Publisher: Wilmington Square Books
ISBN: 978-1908524478
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A book about a woman from a war-shredded country, who discovers she has breast cancer… Not a bundle of laughs, one would assume. One would be wrong. Chernobyl Strawberries is, amongst other things, very funny.

Goldsworthy decided to write this memoir after her cancer diagnosis, as a record for her son. She plays on the contradictions of her life to great effect. A bourgeois from a socialist country, she doesn't have any misery stories about Tito's dictatorship. Indeed, she concentrates on the ridicule moments of a government in decline. The reader also witnesses the high level of education offered by the communist country. State subsidies helped poetry magazines and festivals to survive. One of the nicest things about being a poet in socialist Yugoslavia was the idea that poetry mattered, Goldsworthy observes. She was invited to read her poems in front of an audience of thirty thousand people at a commemoration for Tito, an event discreetly supervised by the police. As a student, she was also a presenter on a radio station funded by the government. These skills prove useful when she moves to London and works for the BBC.

Her early life in Belgrade is presented to us non-chronologically so that the reader constantly dips in and out of it. We get to know the young Vesna well. A confident young woman, she seems to have been successful in every ambition, while intelligent and good-looking young men courted her. The one who she finally settled on was English, and Goldsworthy moved to London.

We see her settling into her new country and the funniest moments of the book are when she contrasts her English life with the very different customs of her native country.

As a woman caught in history, Goldsworthy appears remarkably adaptable. Rather than try and influence events or engage politically, she adapts and survives with ease. She comments on the chameleon-like quality of her youth and concludes that, at forty-one, I discovered that I was no longer able to change colour at all. I stretched my white body on my big green leaf, a bald, wounded caterpillar. I was free. This journey is intelligently written. The beauty of Belgrade provides a melancholic undertone and we can only mourn, with the writer, the lost world which she conjures up.

For other riveting memoirs and biographies, do check out I'll Tell Me Ma: A Childhood Memoir by Brian Keenan and Bluebird: a Memoir by Vesna Maric

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You can read more book reviews or buy Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy at Amazon.com.

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