Matt McAvoy Book Review

If I hadn’t started this book only very late one evening, I would have finished it in a single reading. Not Pregnant by Karina Savaryna is an expression of the grief of every woman in every century who has longed for a child. Like the mother of the Jewish prophet Samuel, she is ‘a woman sorely troubled’, speaking out of her great anxiety and distress. The book is intense and unrelenting but it is also as gripping and expressive as Shakespeare. Having begun to read, one is drawn in. The tragedy, in effect, demands to be told.

Khrustalyna, who believes she was born for suffering because of her abnormal name, lives with her husband, Dima, in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. She works for a large company in a crowd of social media management people and their abbreviated world of posts, comments, instagrams, texts and emojis that have become the new normal and which provide elements of humour throughout the book. She has been trying to fall pregnant for five years while Kiev, it seems, is full of wombs and in every one there is a baby. Meanwhile, she has had to endure the usual thoughtless quips about the inevitability of her own pregnancy and her merciless body clock: “Hey, aren't you pregnant yet?”; “I have a good cosmetologist; she gave me Botox. I see it is already time for you to have some also.” This life contrasts starkly with her rural upbringing and, while the portions of the book concerning her encounters with city health professionals are related in punctuated speech, often wittily devastating, further in are lengthier and beautiful descriptions of the Ukrainian countryside and village life. They are more poignant because of the quality of the writing and the translation by Olena Dovzhenko.

I counted thirteen doctors, witchdoctors and pregnancy aids of dubious value that Khrustalyna tried in order to conceive until, one night, she received a comment below her post on a women’s forum: “‘you are infertile’…I began to choke. It seemed that I was dying.” Yet, in the midst of her despair, Karina Savaryna brings Kiev vividly to life and the rural men and women who have left their traditional villages to call it home. For me, learning about this city was another benefit of this wonderful book. Everywhere she goes and everything she describes reminds the author of her longing to have a child.