Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl

by Markiyan Kamysh Narrated by BJ Harrison

Overview

Since the Chornobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, the area remains a toxic, forbidden wasteland. The zone has become a place for meditation at the edge of geography where you can lose yourself. As with all dangerous places, this terra incognita attracts a wild assortment of adventurers who climb over the barbed wire illegally to witness the aftermath of catastrophe in the flesh. Breaking the law here is a pilgrimage: a metamodern sacred experience that coexists with thrash.



Markiyan Kamysh, whose father worked as an on-site disaster liquidator of Chornobyl, works as a "stalker," guiding people who dare to venture into the disaster area for thrills. Kamysh tells us about thieves who hide in the abandoned buildings, the policemen who chase them, and the romantic utopists who have built families here, even as deadly toxic waste lingers in the buildings, playgrounds, and streams.



More than extraordinary guide to this alien world, Kamysh writes with a singular style that is both brash and bold, conferring an understated elegance to this dystopian reality. Stalking the Atomic City is a haunting account of what total autonomy could mean in our growingly fractured world.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"If Hunter S. Thompson were to write a Lonely Planet Guide to the Zone, it might sound something like Stalking the Atomic City—but Kamysh’s range is broader, his perceptions and language more nuanced."
—Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr, The Harvard Review

"Remarkable."
—The Guardian (UK)

'"Grimly fascinating insights ... a memorable read." 
—Independent

"An extraordinary window on Chernobyl." 
—New Scientist

"An existential travel guide and an experiment in gonzo psychogeography, it stirs obvious comparisons with Hunter S Thompson ... mesmerising."
—Telegraph

"In “Stalking the Atomic City,” Mr. Kamysh gives an impressionistic account of sneaking into and guiding daring travelers around the Exclusion Zone. [...] His book’s subtitle—“Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl”—winks at Hunter S. Thompson’s zany report on the 1970 Kentucky Derby, and the book’s set pieces are appropriately gonzo...The voice of the “Chornobyl underground in literature” approaches his calling with a smirking fatalism."
—Benjamin Shull, The Wall Street Journal

"Every once in a while, I’ll read something about tourists venturing into the area around Chornobyl for a day or two, and the effect is somewhat dizzying. Markiyan Kamysh’s new book is infinitely more so—this is an intimate, lived-in account of a ruined landscape and the people who find themselves drawn to it. It’s a haunting, immersive read."
—Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

"...the rot and ruin of Stalking the Atomic City is rendered in gorgeous prose that highlights the sublime beauty of its toxic setting." 
—CrimeReads

"Stalking the Atomic City is a brilliant, angry, witty, passionate book about the end of the future and what happens afterwards — Tarkovsky meets Hunter S. Thompson. Read it." 
—Kevin Power, author of White City

"A voice that must be heard."
—Patti Smith

"The exhilaration of the intrepid trespasser sings throughout this crass, funky ode to an addiction to living in the realm of desolation."
—Peggy Kurkowski, Shelf Awareness

"In the shadow of catastrophe, Markiyan Kamysh writes with all of youth’s wayward lyricism, like a nuclear Kerouac." 
—Rob Doyle, author of Threshold

"A gonzo account of life as a 'stalker'—a shadowy thrill-seeker haunting the Chornobyl exclusion zone after dark, sneaking past the guards and scaling radio masts. Kamysh’s throbbing, fragmentary prose offers heart-stopping insight into what drives those who choose to trespass in dangerous places: reckless abandon in abandoned places." 
—Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

"Evocative... a stark metaphor for post-Soviet depravity.... Captures the zone's strange mix of beauty and bleakness with precision. A captivating study of 'the most exotic place on earth'."
—Publishers Weekly

"Not since Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano have I been so enthralled by such a poetic rush to madness. But that was fiction: Markiyan Kamysh’s epic immersion in this dread symbol of humanity’s self-inflicted undoing is shockingly real, recounted in a stunning, original voice as lyrical as it is unnerving."
—Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us and Countdown

"A visceral, graphic report from dystopia."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Although the sad and dark atmosphere of the Zone might suggest a merciless chronicle of the ghosts that the Chornobyl disaster released into history, Kamysh is moving, escalating with maturity the register of his language from energetic to ardent, melancholy theology."
—Corriere della Sera

"A fantastic account about the reality of disaster… With morbid fascination, Kamysh forcefully draws us through this territory of death where the memories of the Soviet Union are being gradually buried… A true backpacker’s guide for disaster tourists."
—L'Humanité (France)

"As much a radioactive walk as a fascinating poem on the 'destroyed' youth who live behind the barbed wire of this irradiated space."
—20 Minutes (France)

"A stunning book… a personal and hallucinatory account of this unique place. In the zone, no one can escape their ghosts." 
—Le Nouvel Observateur (France)

"A flamboyant story... A wild trip to the heart of a radioactive jungle."
—Les Inrockuptibles (France)

Kirkus Reviews

2021-12-24
Confessions of a Zoneaholic.

Ukrainian writer Kamysh makes his book debut with a raw account of his journeys as an illegal tourist—“a stalker, a walker, a tracker, an idiot”—in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the bleak area surrounding the site of the 1986 disaster at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. His father, a civil engineer, had been a liquidator at the site for six weeks, “when you could still get fried by radiation.” Now Kamysh, and those he guides, see the Zone as a destination for grungy adventures. In abandoned towns “overtaken by desolation and death,” they go to “guzzle down cheap vodka, smash windows with empty bottles, curse way too loudly and do other things that distinguish living towns from dead ones.” Kamysh paints a picture—and includes his own photographs—of a stark, surreal landscape: empty apartments where he finds syringes and dead animals (including the rotting corpse of a wolf); crumbling houses with moss-covered roofs; and bars “where smugglers, looters, and border guards all booze together.” Although he repeatedly vows never to step foot in the Zone again, he cannot resist its allure. He has gone to the Zone in the dead of winter, stomping into an endless blizzard, freezing through the night. “We know how stupid our escapades are,” Kamysh writes, but his own motivation is not merely to experience extreme tourism. He revels in a feeling of “true alienation: treading unfamiliar paths and sinking into swamps without a compass or a map, looking up at the stars you know nothing about.” In sparsely repopulated villages and secluded borderlands, following the paths of smugglers looking for scrap metal, Kamysh admits he is looking for “something unattainable”—an antidote, perhaps, to complacency and consumerism. Illegal tourists revive dead cities. “They breathe life into the empty shells of fragile houses” and make the Zone “a place worth living for.” Translators Leliv and Costigan-Humes capture Kamysh’s angry, sometimes hauntingly rueful prose.

A visceral, graphic report from dystopia.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175357852
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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