Challenge worth completing

It was a slow book to get into, in the beginning I could not understand what is the structure of this book, how these stories come together, she rambles on and you lose what she was talking about initially, the chapters are very long and there are large parts in parentheses. In the audiobook it is hard to understand these transitions and stories within stories. Though, the actress reading the audiobook does an excellent job.

However, almost half-way through, I started to love it, somehow all the mosaic pieces start to fall into their places, it becomes easier to understand when she has rambled off and to remember which place we are still at. I have got more familiar with the main actors and have started to like them. The dream format almost makes it like a mystery/thriller...

But most of all I love the deep and sharp contemplation not only of the Ukrainian history and its present, but more widely of life, death, love - the big questions.

The highest praise for a book is that you can't stop thinking about it and this is this kind of a book. ( )

This is a huge, sweeping novel told in straight narrative, dreams, and flashbacks. It is long (750 pages) and intense. It took me three month to read it. The amazing thing was that although it is complicated and covers a vast swath of Ukrainian history and contemporary politics, I never got lost in the many times I put it aside. Every time I picked it up I knew exactly where I had left off, even when I had set it aside for more than a week and read 4 or 5 other books in the interim.

An amazing, rewarding, and essential read. ( )

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is a treasure, like an icon wrapped in intricate cloth buried by a mother before a siege. The novel by Oksana Zabuzhko is the story of Ukraine woven from the fabric of individual lives of characters and events from the history of the region. Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe that borders the Russian Federation to the northeast and Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to the west. Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved after it endured a long history of occupations, resistance fighting, and civil war. The main characters in the novel are fiercely identified with the country and attempt to find cues in their lives and the history of the land to reach and preserve the richness of their heritage.

Daryna Goshchynska is a television journalist who specializes in biographical portraits of interesting Ukrainians, especially citizens involved in preserving and advancing the culture of her country. An artist, Vladyslava Mutesevych, intrigues Daryna with her collages that the artist calls, Cycle Secrets, made up of fragmentary relics of the lives Ukrainians. The term, "secrets" come from Vladyslava's memories of a game she played with other children of burying pretty displays of colorful objects wrapped in nice material. They would dig them open in subsequent days to see enjoy the beauty of the display, mimicking their mothers' stories of buried icons. Daryna sees the collage relics as cues to her culture that produce strong emotions in her and a desire to uncover linked secrets from the past. She finds a photograph of members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, resistance fighters, four men and a woman taken in the late 1940s during the occupation of Ukraine by Stalin's forces. Daryna begins research on the woman, Olena Dovgan, and finds many buried secrets of culture in documents and oral histories.

The current political and economic situation in Ukraine interferes with Daryna's professional and personal life, but she persists in her research in preparation for Olena's biography. Daryna's research activities give the reader a realistic view of current daily life in Ukraine. Her personal character is revealed in her love relationship with an antiques dealer, Adrian Ambrozich, the great nephew of Olena. Daryna's research also presents a picture of the legacy of several generations of Ukrainians associated with their resistance to occupation and their willingness to die for their country.

The translation of the novel by Nina Shevchuck-Murray is a tightly woven tapestry with many knots per square centimeter. The thoughts of the main narrator Daryna are described in great detail so that every sentence is an important thread to a complete understanding of her emotions and motivations. Adrian's inner life is also richly woven when the narration switches to him and his nightly dreams. The conversations of the characters are rich with personal revelations and impressions from different viewpoints of Ukrainian history.

I greatly enjoyed reading this lengthy novel (696 pages in my edition) and recommend it to readers who have time to explore the collage presented by Oksana Zabuzhko. A powerful lasting theme nicely created is that Ukarainian women are the informal historians of their culture, the preservers of dreams of generations, and custodians of the iconic hidden secrets. ( )