Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya - Criticism

Criticism

A criticism often levelled at Åsne Seierstad is her tendency to present personal stories which have not been fully cross-checked for accuracy. Her style, blending historical facts with personal accounts, sometimes blurs the boundary between fact and fiction and language gaps can cause misunderstandings. By focusing on such a small group of individuals to present her case, she fails to prove any abuses or wrongdoing is systemic, and therefore cannot easily hold people to account for their actions.

In Angel of Grozny she goes a step further by writing some sections of the book in the third person. She describes events she did not witness, often in vivid and evocative language which is ill-suited to the actual person telling the story. The Manchester Guardian reviewer described the "blurring of reportage and imagined scenes" as "sometimes uncomfortable".

Read more about this topic:  Angel Of Grozny: Inside Chechnya

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