The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

by Zabuzhko, Oksana; Shevchuk-murray, Nina

• ISBN13: 9781611090116
• ISBN10: 1611090113
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-10-09
• Publisher: Amazon Pub

Summary

Set in tumultous contemporary Ukraine, this intircate story of love, sex, friendship, and death is centered around three women, two of whom - Daryna, a TV director, and Vlada, a painter - live in our time, and the third of whom, Olena, died in World War II in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. One day Daryna is struck by a picture of Olena she found in an archive, and she starts a documentary based on Olena's story. That's how she meets Olena's grandson and falls in love with him. Soon, however, Daryna discovers that their love is overshadowed by the dark secrets of the silenced past, and that the dead may find their posthumous ways of continuing their disrupted missions...Daryna now faces two mysteries, two women's deaths separated in time by sixty years, both of which have so dramatically interfered with her life. Does the past ever pass? Should one "dig up" the "abandoned secrets" of history, or would it be better, for the sake of safety, to never touch them? And how do we come to terms with the traumas of the past which we don't know we'd inherited, once they are so unexpectedly revealed?While men act as the agents of history, women stay its invisible keepers - that's what Daryna understands. Now it's her turn to break that silence...