Oleksij Čupa, Tales from my air raid shelter, translation by Alessandro Achilli, Trento, Il Margine, 2023, 240 pages, € 17 [Kazky moho bomboschovyšča, Kharkiv, Klub Simejnoho Dozvillja, 2015]
2023
Abstrakt
"You open a book and it is full of characters. Close it and they are gone", the author says in the last pages of the novel.
But in this case, besides opening a book, Oleksij Čupa brings his reader in front of "a very heavy metal door". Once the writer opens, one by one, all the apartment doors hiding behind that big door of his building in Makijivka and, going up the stairs introduces the reader to its inhabitants, these characters no longer leave him so easily.
In his calm and sincere voice, sometimes to the point of disgust, Ukrainian poet and prose writer Oleksij Čupa tells twelve tales, which instead of titles present the numbers of the apartments in the building, from 12 to 23.