I Will Die in a Foreign Land

First impression review, so this will be all over the place, but I'll try. I just finished this book and it feels like someone tore my heart out with their bare hands, especially throughout the last 40 pages or so. My God. I also, however, feel like immediately reading it again, as there were some revelations close to the end that I never saw coming. *But* this is *not* a novel that has its strengths in its surprising revelations; it's so much better than that. It breathes life into 'the news' and into Ukrainian history. The 2014 Euromaidan and anything leading up to it had felt distant, the facts about it had seemed murky, to me before I read this – as I'm sure they did to many Westerners. It's easy to lose sight of *individuals* when you hear about all the bad in the world, especially when your knowledge about it admittedly has gaps, and consists only of what the news media considered important to show you at the time. But Pickhart's novel fills this complex conflict with characters that I found very easy to care about. She provides a view of the fracturedness and great tragedies of the Ukrainian people's recent and Soviet history while imagining rounded, flawed, and very *loving* fictional humans in these events, that you just can't help but root for. Slava, the young activist who loves and loses. Katya, a Ukrainian-American doctor caring for the injured at the protests, trying to find a point in life again. One of them, Aleksandr, an old, former KGB agent and now pianist, whose story on a cassette tape unravels slowly, slowly, and then all at once, in ways that just absolutely crush you. Dascha, the brave and ambitious filmmaker. Misha, an engineer, forever haunted by how Chernobyl robbed him of people he loved. – None of them have given up on hope. And I was rooting so much for everyone in this. Toughened but vulnerable characters, with different hopeful spots of light in their lives despite all their current and past losses, despite their often serious struggles with their own identity and past. Lots of "oh God no, not this on top of everything, hasn't s/he already been through enough?" moments – that still never feel like excessive trauma portrayal, but like realistic events. Pickhart's writing style jumps back and forth intentionally, changes between one very short chapter and the next. There are many different text forms, the chapters are arranged largely non-chronologically: they range from folk lyrics, to newspaper articles, to lists, to transcripts of one character's audio recordings, to, of course, her lovely minimalist prose. Never saying one word too much, never losing herself in trivialities, it's impressive how she still manages to deliver emotional punches easily. In my view her scenes and descriptions never miss the mark, cross into cliché territory, or become overly-anything. They're just right. But you have to be fine with a sort of patchwork quilt of different text forms to enjoy this, I think. I'm glad I picked up this book even though the ongoing war is a vast source of anxiety and fear for the future for me as a Central European, and even though with books, I appreciate any escapism I get from that specific real-world topic. But the way this book shows some of the recent historic background of the conflict, and how sensibly it humanizes the kinds of people that have been living through it, is nothing short of a treasure in my eyes.