REVIEWS
Finding defiant beauty amid the devastation of war
Seeking respite from the destruction wreaked by missiles on Kharkiv, Jen Stout snatches a few moments by the river. The author of Night Train to Odesa has already borne witness to the blown-out windows of the Derzhprom (the city’s avant-garde Soviet showpiece), the bombed-out schools, the high-rises where cats now roam. But the sight of fishermen “still as herons” and swallows that dart in “dizzying patterns” send “little waves of happiness wash[ing] through [her].”
It is Stout’s openness to the beauty that survives amid the dereliction, and the joy that survives amid the despair, that makes her book so extraordinary. Though true to its subtitle – “covering the human cost of Russia’s war” – it is less a threnody than a triumphal hymn: to our capacity for love and endurance in the face of unthinkable brutality.
Stout was not a war reporter when Putin invaded in February 2022; she was a Shetland-based journalist on a fellowship to Moscow. As all
