My around-the-world reading project got stuck in the Bs because there just aren’t a lot of books on Belarus. One of my attempts turned out to be about Poland. The problem, it seems, is that Belarus doesn’t have a big enough literary culture to produce books that are translated to English, and the few that have been published here aren’t held at my library. It’s a relatively small country (9.5 million people), and most people speak Russian, which has a rich literary tradition of its own.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is set in Belarus, but it’s not exactly a Belarusian book. The author is an American living in San Diego. The story has a uniquely Belarusian aspect, though: the main character is a teenager who was born massively deformed because of fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred in Ukraine near the border with Belarus. Anywhere from 12% to 25% of Belarus’s territory continues to be contaminated, depending on who’s counting. Children born in the immediate aftermath had very high rates of birth defects and ongoing health issues from the radiation exposure.
Our hero, Ivan Isaenko, is a 17-year-old who has spent his entire life at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children when we meet him, in 2005. He has nubs instead of legs and one arm, and his working arm has a hand missing fingers. He was abandoned by his family, so all he knows is life in the hospital. His world is the hospital routine, the staff members who care for him, and the other patients. The problem is that some of the other patients are uncommunicative, and others have life-limiting health conditions. It’s a lonely existence, giving Ivan a lot of time to read and think.
Until a cancer patient named Polina shows up. Her parents died in an accident, so she, too, is alone. And she’s very bored. She and Ivan strike up a friendship, and that changes everything.
I liked this book, although I was disappointed that it wasn’t really about Belarus. It has a lot of strong characters dealing with stressful situations and figuring out how to make a life.
