When you look underneath a woman who walks on water, whose husband comes home and takes his brain out of his head, or a woman who collects her husband’s “big juicy apricots,” look past character names like Teacher of Joy, Surrealist’s Daughter, Stone Chunk, and Beautiful Question, Ehin’s stories are predominantly about relationships, mostly that between lovers. Her characters fall in and out of love, back in and out again, ever changing, ever keeping secrets. At times, the connections to tangible, and recognizable aspects of relationships are visible, though even then there is no certain, specific comparison—as in “Cushions,” where the narrator and her husband are literally deaf to each other, and only each other: “I realized that whenever I related my tales to my husband, he was relating his to me at the same time.” But mostly, when the people come into conflict with one another, the parallels to our lives are indistinct.

The repetition with variation of conflict is not necessarily man versus woman, but man and woman struggling within themselves, and it is the outward expression of that struggle that erupts their relationships. Many of the stories open quickly, directly into their odd world, as in the first sentence of “Patterns,” when the narrator tells us “The three men I’ve bitten arms off of are doing well.” These men, all named Jaan, did nothing to deserve her violence—this impossible, animalistic violence. Each of them simply woke her, but in the wakings, no matter the love, or the peacefulness of the situation, there is a suggestion of control, such as when one has made her breakfast and wants to eat it with her before it gets cold. The women of Walker on Water are tensed, so aware of a culture in which men are violent, are cruel and controlling, that they live on the taut edge of fight or flight. So the arm-chewing woman, when her husband came to her, “felt his gigantic, rapidly twitching muscle” and “Rage struck [her] like a thunderbolt.” She did not want to bite his arm off, but taken from sleep, the instinct, the reaction to the dark potentials of intertwined lives, could not be helped.

The characters of these stories bring their pasts, and their secrets, to their relationships. The woman of the story “Walker on Water” only goes on her walks when her husband is not there, just as he only reveals his skull-emptying evenings after they begin living together. In “Gold Key,” another in the apricot collector’s cycle of stories, she admits, “my husband isn’t a particularly curious person and he hasn’t stumbled upon my collection yet. He has his own collections too that are hidden behind all sorts of passwords.” The preservation of secrets is not only to maintain relations, but to stabilize a self, an attempt that often fails. In Walker on Water, the connections between lovers are made and broken, and often again and again, because identities are constantly transforming.

There are a couple sets of story cycles that feature the same character or characters in shifting forms, in new situations. These help along the sense that Ehin’s very brief stories are fairy tales, just glimpses of a legend. Ilmar Lehtpere’s translation is consistent in its odd, casual tone, making the strangeness feel natural, ensuring the tales feel like they’re from from the same collection of legends. “The Surrealist’s Daughter” begins one of these cycles. Throughout it the daughter not only manifests physical transformations—into a black stork or her job as a cabaret dancer where she “was a woman of many faces and many bodies”—but in identity, as when she “adopted another father” and became the Beekeeper’s stepdaughter. Altered identities necessarily alter the relationships those identities are part of. Before the Surrealist’s daughter becomes the Beekeeper’s stepdaughter, the narrator of this cycle drifted from her, attempting to return when she has made her change, only to find that impossible, to find her interested in another—one who suits her new identity.

As the shifts in shade of—or complete changes in—identities begin and end relationships, one of the core themes of Walker on Water, melancholy celebrations, comes into clarity. It is a sad, strange articulation of a part of life sometimes looked over. There are countless books and movies that idealize the single love of one’s life, but Ehin acknowledges that most of us will have multiple loves throughout our lives. Some will end peacefully; others will end in pain. Our partners too will have those many loves, and the weight of secrets that comes with them, so “In the end we all have to swallow the collections of our husbands and wives.”

This is the clearest, most over-arching way the fairy tale, the magical, the bizarre, is made relatable in Walker on Water. The majority of the time, the connection is not so distinct. The stories, in their vagueness, and departure from realism, are open-ended, the breadth of interpretation wide. For some readers, this could be unsatisfying, for others, exactly what is desired. Ehin’s method works better in some stories than others, where the stories are too vague, don’t have any of their own ground to stand on. The most wonderful moments are passages where it is as if language fails Ehin, as if realism could not express these lives, so Ehin is only writing as she must, and our job is to translate them into something familiar, relatable: “A sticky silence flowed into my ears. I poured music into my ears, the voices of friends, the rumble of cars, the ringing of phones and more friend’s voices, but nothing helped. The sticky hot silence wrapped itself around my heart.” In the end, it is a light collection, playful even in its darkness—a short book that manages to be both loveable, and forgettable.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

There are books that can only wisely be recommended to specific types of readers, where it is easy to know who the respective book won’t appeal to, and Kristiina Ehin’s Walker on Water is one these. What makes this neither a criticism, nor the identification of a flaw is that Walker on Water is an unusual book that pushes boundaries, and the readers it would most appeal to are vastly different. This book is for those who like their stories very brief, abstracted, non-linear, without traditional character or plot, and for those to whom fabulism appeals, those who want stories to be strange and magical, something resembling, but far from, fairy tales.

When you look underneath a woman who walks on water, whose husband comes home and takes his brain out of his head, or a woman who collects her husband’s “big juicy apricots,” look past character names like Teacher of Joy, Surrealist’s Daughter, Stone Chunk, and Beautiful Question, Ehin’s stories are predominantly about relationships, mostly that between lovers. Her characters fall in and out of love, back in and out again, ever changing, ever keeping secrets. At times, the connections to tangible, and recognizable aspects of relationships are visible, though even then there is no certain, specific comparison—as in “Cushions,” where the narrator and her husband are literally deaf to each other, and only each other: “I realized that whenever I related my tales to my husband, he was relating his to me at the same time.” But mostly, when the people come into conflict with one another, the parallels to our lives are indistinct.

The repetition with variation of conflict is not necessarily man versus woman, but man and woman struggling within themselves, and it is the outward expression of that struggle that erupts their relationships. Many of the stories open quickly, directly into their odd world, as in the first sentence of “Patterns,” when the narrator tells us “The three men I’ve bitten arms off of are doing well.” These men, all named Jaan, did nothing to deserve her violence—this impossible, animalistic violence. Each of them simply woke her, but in the wakings, no matter the love, or the peacefulness of the situation, there is a suggestion of control, such as when one has made her breakfast and wants to eat it with her before it gets cold. The women of Walker on Water are tensed, so aware of a culture in which men are violent, are cruel and controlling, that they live on the taut edge of fight or flight. So the arm-chewing woman, when her husband came to her, “felt his gigantic, rapidly twitching muscle” and “Rage struck [her] like a thunderbolt.” She did not want to bite his arm off, but taken from sleep, the instinct, the reaction to the dark potentials of intertwined lives, could not be helped.

For the rest of the review, go here.

by Sofi Oksanen. Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers. (Finland-Estonia, Grove/Black Cat)

In terms of the book itself, I don’t have a lot to add to Larissa’s perceptive review. But to tie this particular post back into the actual WPR “Here On Earth” conversation that sparked this sporadic series of posts, I have to post a picture of Sofi, aka, the “woman with the most amazing hair.” (I feel like I must’ve mentioned this a half-dozen times during that interview . . . it was like my verbal crutch of the moment . . .):

I finally met Sofi at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and really enjoyed talking with her. I say “finally” because I was supposed to meet her at the Reykjavik International Literary Festival last fall, but she wasn’t able to make it due to a bout of the swine flu. And continuing with a bit of cursed luck, prior to PEN World Voices, she was supposed to read in California, but, well, the volcano nixed that trip . . . As a friend said, she could write a book on being impacted by the not-so-insignificant global disasters of recent times.

Anyway, Purge is a really interesting book, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else Oksanen ends up writing. She’s really at the top of her game right now, having recently won the Nordic Prize for Purge, and was named Estonia’s “Person of the Year” in 2009.

Although this may not be the most uplifting of the books in our summer roundup, it’s definitely worth checking out.

The novel opens in 1991—the year after Estonia reclaimed its independence from Russia—with the elderly and isolated Aliide Truu stoically weathering childish torments (rocks thrown at her window) and more aggressive harassment (her dog poisoned) at the hands of her neighbors. One rainy morning, Aliide notices an injured young girl huddling in her front yard, and despite her misgivings, allows the girl to take shelter in her home. Zara is a young woman from Russia—a sex trafficking victim on the run from her captors. Having withstood a year of degradation and repeated assaults, Zara has lost everything. Everything, that is, except a yellowed photograph of her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, with both young women and standing in front of the very Estonian house in which Zara has taken refuge.

Oksanen originally staged Purge as a play, an origin that can still be recognized in its episodic scenes and deliberately moderated tension. In its current form, however, the novel’s fluid and unadorned prose (in a musical and nuanced translation by Lola Rogers) shares a closer kinship with a psychological thriller. Both Aliide and Zara are survivors in the truest sense of the word—their suffering purposefully repressed by sheer force of will, their sole motivation to protect themselves from further harm. And they are both connected by a dense and untold family history that has festered for over four decades.

As the novel delves into Aliide’s past and the thirty-odd years that Estonia spent under Soviet occupation, it becomes apparent that the events of the present have all spun out from the same traumatic incident—a brutal “interrogation” that Aliide endured at the hands of several soldiers. Rape and assault were frighteningly common experiences for young Estonian women during this time, although not ones which were ever acknowledged—even by others who had gone through similar attacks. Rather, these women became isolated within their own communities and families, silent and ashamed. Aliide not only goes to great lengths to secret her experience, but also to distance herself from other victims. “She recognized the smell of women on the street, the smell that said something similar happened to them,” we’re told.

From every trembling hand, she could tell—there’s another one. From every flinch at the sound of a Russian soldier’s shout and every lurch at the tramp of boots. Her, too? Every one who couldn’t keep herself from crossing the street when militiamen or soldiers approached. Every one with a waistband on her dress that showed she was wearing several pairs of underwear. Every one who couldn’t look you in the eye . . .

When she found herself in proximity with one of those women, she tried to stay as far away from her as she could. So no one would notice similarities in their behavior . . . because you never knew when one of those men might happen by, a man she would remember for all eternity. And maybe it would be the same man as the other woman’s . . . And they wouldn’t be able to keep themselves from flinching at the same time, if they heard a familiar voice. They wouldn’t be able to raise their glass without spilling. They would be discovered. Someone would know.

Even as Aliide’s attempts at self-preservation become increasingly damaging to those around her—even as she allows herself to become complicit in the violations, abuses, and deportations that take place in her own home—the novel still treats her with a great depth of empathy. This is not to say that she is absolved of her actions—much to the contrary. But she is understood to be a casualty of her time and circumstances, and utterly alone with her memories and her guilt. As she realizes late in the novel, her whole life was spent “[w]aiting for someone . . . Someone who would do something to help or at least take away part of what had happened in that cellar.”

Stroke her hair and say that it wasn’t her fault. And say that it would never happen again, no matter what. And when she realized what she had been waiting for, she understood that that person would never come. No one would ever come to her and say those words, and mean them, and see that it never happened again.

There can be no real absolution for Aliide. This fact may be difficult for American readers, who have perhaps become accustomed to narratives of trauma and emotional distress which end in redemption—in the characters achieving some sort of closure, if not an out and out resolution to their suffering. In reality, however, true healing is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and impossible, the novel reminds us, if the victims involved are not able to discuss their experiences.

Where Purge does take hope, however, is in Zara, a young woman who has broken free of the cycle of victimization. Through her, Aliide’s experiences—as well as those of her grandmother and mother—will finally come to light. It is a painful history to be sure, as is that of the Estonian nation. But in order to move forward—in order to truly reconcile with the past—such stories must finally be heard and examined.

Since this was one of the books I recommended on “Here on Earth,” I’ll save my comments for another post (which will be up in just a minute).

Larissa is one of our regular contributors and tends to focus on Scandinavian literature, which is one of her big interests. (That said, she’s also working on a review of Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango.)

Here’s the beginning of her review:

Although still much an unknown in the English-speaking world, Finnish-Estonian playwright, novelist, and activist Sofi Oksanen has become something of a household name in northern and central Europe. Declared Estonia’s “Person of the Year” in 2009, Oksanen is the first to win both of Finland’s prestigious literary prizes—the Finlandia and the Runeberg—as well as winning this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize for her virtuosic novel Purge. At once a daring exploration of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, as well as a wrenching consideration of the irrevocable effects of trauma on an individual, Purge navigates the tragedies, petty betrayals, and reverberating guilt of three generations of Estonian women, all struggling to survive their own violent circumstances, no matter the cost.

The novel opens in 1991—the year after Estonia reclaimed its independence from Russia—with the elderly and isolated Aliide Truu stoically weathering childish torments (rocks thrown at her window) and more aggressive harassment (her dog poisoned) at the hands of her neighbors. One rainy morning, Aliide notices an injured young girl huddling in her front yard, and despite her misgivings, allows the girl to take shelter in her home. Zara is a young woman from Russia—a sex trafficking victim on the run from her captors. Having withstood a year of degradation and repeated assaults, Zara has lost everything. Everything, that is, except a yellowed photograph of her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, with both young women and standing in front of the very Estonian house in which Zara has taken refuge.

Oksanen originally staged Purge as a play, an origin that can still be recognized in its episodic scenes and deliberately moderated tension. In its current form, however, the novel’s fluid and unadorned prose (in a musical and nuanced translation by Lola Rogers) shares a closer kinship with a psychological thriller.

Click here to read the entire review.

Although the title would be well suited to a mediocre sit-com, this novel sounds pretty interesting:

The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939) was Tammsaare’s last novel (he died the following year). This edition is a revision, by Christopher Moseley, of an English translation by Olga Shartze published in Moscow in 1978, the hundredth anniversary of Tammsaare’s birth. In contrast to the ambition and breadth of Truth and Justice, it has the deceptive simplicity of a folktale.

On its surface, the novel’s plot is extremely mundane. Jürka, a brawny, simpleminded peasant farmer, struggles for economic survival against the elements and the whims of his double-dealing, double-talking neighbor (and later landlord), known locally as Cunning Ants. Life on Jürka’s farm, the Pit, is difficult and harsh: in the course of his long life Jürka buries two wives and also a few of his children, who are so numerous that Tammsaare never bothers to mention them all. Predictably, Ants takes advantage of Jürka’s labor, his good nature, and his almost total lack of business sense, until at the end of the story, when Ants threatens everything Jürka has worked so hard for, Jürka commits a violent and foolhardy act of revenge.

What saves the book from being little more than a rustic melodrama is the supernatural twist Tammsaare has given it: Jürka is Satan in human form. In a prologue, we witness a conversation between Satan and St. Peter in which we learn that the continued existence of hell is threatened by God’s suspicion that human beings are incapable of salvation and should therefore not be eternally punished for failing at something that was never within their power to achieve. To protect his fiefdom, Satan agrees to be subjected to earthly incarnation so as to win salvation and thereby prove God wrong. If he succeeds, then God will let hell—and humankind—continue to exist.

Dan’s one of our longtime reviewers (see his other pieces here) and you can read his full review of The Misadventures of the New Satan by clicking here.

The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939) was Tammsaare’s last novel (he died the following year). This edition is a revision, by Christopher Moseley, of an English translation by Olga Shartze published in Moscow in 1978, the hundredth anniversary of Tammsaare’s birth. In contrast to the ambition and breadth of Truth and Justice, it has the deceptive simplicity of a folktale.

On its surface, the novel’s plot is extremely mundane. Jürka, a brawny, simpleminded peasant farmer, struggles for economic survival against the elements and the whims of his double-dealing, double-talking neighbor (and later landlord), known locally as Cunning Ants. Life on Jürka’s farm, the Pit, is difficult and harsh: in the course of his long life Jürka buries two wives and also a few of his children, who are so numerous that Tammsaare never bothers to mention them all. Predictably, Ants takes advantage of Jürka’s labor, his good nature, and his almost total lack of business sense, until at the end of the story, when Ants threatens everything Jürka has worked so hard for, Jürka commits a violent and foolhardy act of revenge.

What saves the book from being little more than a rustic melodrama is the supernatural twist Tammsaare has given it: Jürka is Satan in human form. In a prologue, we witness a conversation between Satan and St. Peter in which we learn that the continued existence of hell is threatened by God’s suspicion that human beings are incapable of salvation and should therefore not be eternally punished for failing at something that was never within their power to achieve. To protect his fiefdom, Satan agrees to be subjected to earthly incarnation so as to win salvation and thereby prove God wrong. If he succeeds, then God will let hell—and humankind—continue to exist.

This premise makes for moments of social comedy as, for example, both Ants and the self-serving village pastor marvel at Jürka’s strong desire for redemption, which dwarfs their own more practically motivated religious faith. (Tammsaare has Ants think of himself as “[not] too devout, of course, but he had the wits to give the matter serious thought shortly before the end. What counted was whether you believed or not just before you died.”) Although Jürka insists to each of them that he is actually the Devil and craves salvation only as a means of keeping hell going, they either consider this a sign of mental instability or, even if they accept it as true, believe it to be of no real bearing in a world where arranging a comfortable life on Earth takes priority over planning for the future of one’s soul.

Tammsaare is adept at deadpan humor, especially in the dialogues between Jürka and Ants, whose self-interest defies logic and yet makes a twisted sense of its own, almost as if he were a precursor of the unabashed profiteer Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22:

‘Concerning that house which we built on my crossroads with your loan. You see, Jürka, this house is, so to say, part of the Pit, in as much as it was built with that land-improvement money, and during the time you were the owner of the Pit. And now it’s I who am the owner of the Pit, while you have become the tenant as before. But when you were merely the tenant you wouldn’t have received the loan, and you only got it when you became a property owner. I don’t know what you think about it, but the way I see it is like this: if you’re only a tenant and not the owner could the house which is part of the Pit belong to you? To make my meaning clear, here’s an example: suppose you have an axe and you sell it, would you say that the handle belongs to you after the deal has been made and the money for the axe has been paid you?’

‘I guess not.’

‘The handle, therefore, belongs to the chap who bought the axe, doesn’t it?’

‘I guess so.’

‘We’ve got it all clear then. The Pit is the axe, and the house on the crossroads is the handle, and since I’ve bought the Pit—the axe, in other words, the handle that came with it, meaning the house at the crossroads, also belongs to me.’

‘I see. The Pit was there before the house, of course.’

‘That’s what I say too,’ Ants said in agreement. ‘There was the Pit and then the house appeared—no Pit, no house, because what good is a handle if there’s no axe? . . .’

At the same time, Tammsaare is capable of real poignancy, as when Jürka mourns the accidental death of one of his young children:

Tears welled from his eyes when he lowered the little coffin into the grave, and when the clods of earth fell with a hollow thud on the lid. Jürka’s tears were the talk of the village, for it was a sight no one ever expected to see—imagine that huge bear of a man weeping! . . .

There was one thing that Jürka knew very clearly now—one’s own children meant something entirely different from the calves and lambs one had, from baby birds in the nest, from new, tender shoots on a tree, from grass sprouting in the woods and rye in the fields. None of this had ever brought tears to his eyes.

Ultimately The Misadventures of the New Satan is both a sly satire on human greed and a passionate indictment of human injustice. The humor and the sadness of Tammsaare’s worldview might best be summed up in this early exchange between Ants and Jürka:

‘Well, that’s how it goes in the world,’ Ants said instructively. ‘A small man slaves for a big man, a weak one for a strong one, a fool for a clever man. It’s God Himself who arranged it like that. And whoever goes against this order, goes against God, and anyone who goes against God shall perish. Remember this well, Jürka, and teach this truth to your children. And then you shall build your house on rock, and your herds shall graze in rich pastures.’

Jürka heard him out and said to himself: ‘You keep running up against God everywhere, and He’s always on the side of whoever’s stronger and smarter.’

by Mati Unt. Translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens. (Estonia, Dalkey Archive)

Below is a guest post from Bill Marx — the man behind — about another BTBA 2010 title. Almost there . . . Almost time to announce the finalists . . .

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
Ģ����ý the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems

But can an artist who has absorbed some of the dark times sing of them? Questions of political opportunism, as well as the twisted prerogatives of creative egotism, drive the late Estonian writer Mati Unt’s postmodern historical novel Brecht at Night. Unt isn’t concerned about how playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sang about the rise of Hitler and Stalin or the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Instead, Unt examines, via an arch vaudevillesque irony, the narcissistic machinations of Brecht in the year 1940, when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he and his entourage of wife, mistresses and children end up in Finland, the guests of playwright Hella Wuolijoki, a rich Communist sympathizer with Estonian roots. It is the portrait of the artist as a determinedly abstracted man, aside from his paranoid fear that Hitler has sent out assassins to kill him.

Unt’s Brecht is primarily concerned with making it to America, not attempting to make sense of the gathering forces of the night, which would touch on his uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism. The general impression left by the book is that it isn’t fear of censorship so much as a pervasive inner decay that holds Brecht back from dealing with reality: The worse thing for a writer is not, Brecht thinks, having to keep your mouth shut. Its a lot worse when you have nothing to say via that mouth.

Sadistically, Unt, a narrative kibitzer in the book, surrounds Brecht with realities that should have given the writer plenty to talk about. He provides excerpts from non-fiction accounts (newspaper articles, academic studies) of the horrendous happening in Europe, with a grim emphasis on the Soviet Unions thuggish hijacking of Estonia. He also provides potted biographies of Brecht’s friends and lovers, showing how they were used and abused by Brecht and by history, camp followers betrayed or left on their own to survive.

All of this could have been heavy-handed Brecht the selfish artist slapped around, over and over, in a circumscribed barrel. At his best, however, Unt brings sardonic humor to the dark proceedings, perhaps tapping on his own feelings about being an artist (playwright, novelist, director) bottled up by the Soviet Union. Unt’s Brecht chooses to see the world through Marxian rules, Hegelian hocus-pocus: The covert theme of the book is, of course, dialectics, Brechts greatest love. That streamlined notion of Brecht’s vision isn’t entirely fair, as least to his poetry, which at the time made use of ambiguity and skepticism, a satire that made full use of mockery. Still, the characters intellectual triangulation amusingly seems to free him from looking too deeply at the demands of the here-and-now, aside from the sexual and secretarial demands he makes on the women in his life. (Unt draws on John Fuegi’s biography The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, which details the authors swinish treatment of women.) Occasionally the author tries to wake Brecht up via an impish surrealism, such as having a very un-dialectical frog pop up in his room to give him a scare.

Unt includes a memorably funny chapter about a real-life Estonian government who served as a stooge for the Soviets named M Unt (no relation to the author). The guy counts down his acts of repression before his bosses murder him: Lithuania has been accepted as part of the Soviet Union (3rd August). There’s still time to go before my death.

Still, it is difficult to keep the inventive black humor coming, and by mid-point Brecht at Night increasingly shoves the title artist aside to chronicle the lethal facts of Soviet domination. The books imagination gives way to presentation; it suggests that Unt lost interest in drawing (and re-drawing) ironic attention to Brecht’s disinterest in reality, his obsession with bourgeois comfort during a time of chaos. If Unt had included more of the un-dialectical consciousness that informs the (anti)lyrics in Svendborg Poems the books exploration of the amoral writer-in-exile would have been richer and more compelling. Unt has a considerable reputation as a stage artist but there is surprisingly little dramatic conflict in the book. His Brecht devolves into a didactic puppet.

Unt’s other novels available in English, Things in the Night and Diary of a Blood Donor, tap on rich veins of fantasy (apocalyptic meltdown, vampirism) to evoke the brutal truths about the somnambulism of life under (or after) the domination of the Soviet Union. In Brecht at Night the author speaks openly and powerfully about the crimes of authoritarian barbarity, the degradation of creativity and morality, the slippery slope of self-involvement. But one misses his customary wildness, his imaginative gusto, as he goes about it.

It’s a very poetry heavy issue, with articles about the “legendary” (who was the “guru” of his generation “like Burroughs was for the Beatniks”), on (the title of the piece, “iiii-iiii-iiiiiiiiii! is pretty intriguing), and

There is an article on that is pretty interesting. In the piece, Peeter Helme looks at the paucity of outlets for young Estonian writers—really seems limited to the biannual “novel competition” and the magazine Värske Rõhk (Fresh Pressure) which only publishes authors who are between 17 and 27—and makes some general comments about the fiction the kids are writing today. He basically breaks it down into three categories: science fiction (which is a relatively new genre in Estonian literature), psychological realism (of course), and magical realism (just keep walking).

His info about the winner of the novel competition and the runner-up is pretty interesting. First, about the winner Tiina Laanem and her novel Little Old Men:

This debut novel is an ironic glance at Estonian society: the characters are not real people but caricatures of creatures as they are described in modern lifestyle and women’s magazines.

Helme refers to the novel that placed second—_Pupils of St Nicholas_ (aka The Pupils of Niguliste) by Olle Lauli (a pseudonym)—as being more “lucid” and “grim” than the winning book, and also claims that it was influenced by American Psycho:

This is quite an exception work in Estonian literature. Most importantly, it marks the arrival of the Anglo-American form of the novel in Estonia. The story is quite plot driven, using spoken language, occasionally coarse dialogue and—typically of American authors—the book is extraordinarily bulky, 535 pages. Pupils of St Nicholas is a grim and naturalistic tale about the decline of a successful yuppie and about hopelessly tangled human relations at the beginning of the 21st century in Tallinn. It is very disturbing and, as such, a convincing reading experience.

I’m never thrilled to see international authors trying to mimic the “Anglo-American form of the novel,” but some American publisher might be interested in this. There is also a of this title in this issue of ELM, which gives a bit more insight into the book. (Businessmen, corruption, God, lack of God, and beatings—that’s how I’m sum up their summary.)

Estonian Literary Magazine is published by the which, in my opinion, is one of the best cultural organizations in the world. They—in particular Ilvi Liive—do a fantastic job promoting Estonian literature, arranging for editorial visits, producing beautiful and useful publications, including ELM, which comes out twice a year.

There are a number of interesting articles in this issue worth checking out, including one on who sounds rather interesting:

Kaplinski says: “We mostly write according to plan, knowing what we want to say. A poem, essay or story means growing flesh on bones, clothing a naked thought in images, examples, turning it into literature. My path is the opposite. I start with images, pictures and associations, and try to reach the thought, the understanding, through them” (Ice and Titanic 1995, p 13). The aim, therefore, is to understand. Kaplinski’s manner of writing does not concentrate on external activity, but on the inner states of a character, meditations, flows of thought, memories and dreams.

Also included are pieces on the and which features three younger Estonian women all incorporating folklore into their work.

My favorite section though is the This is a fantastic book review section that is incredibly helpful in deciding which titles to look into . . . In this particular issue, nine titles are highlighted, including works by Tonu Onnepalu (whose Border State came out from Northwestern University Press a few years back), Toomas Vint (whose Woman With a Memory Gap sounds really interesting), Aino Pervik, and Mihkel Mutt. Covering fiction and poetry, this is a great way of getting ones bearings in terms of contemporary Estonian lit.

The book/author that jumped out at me from this section is Ene Mihkelson. I remember Ilvi raving about her new book back at the Frankfurt Book Fair and this review has resparked my interest, not just in the most recent title—Plague Grave—but in her first book—The Sleep of Ahasuerus—as well.

n some respects her new novel, Plague Grave is a mirror image of her previous one, The Sleep of Ahasuerus (2001), though it is, of course, a free-standing work. The first-person narrator of The Sleep of Ahasuerus, who stands in close relationship to the author, reconstructed the story of her father’s death as a Forest Brother through interviews and archival documents; the novel had an exciting plot and even included spy games. In Plague Grave the protagonist’s father is also a murdered Forest Brother; to piece together the story of his death the protagonist hunts down the memories of her 80-year-old aunt Kaata and her mother. The result is a depth-psychological novel, utterly focused on its subject of inquiry, and presenting the empathic reader with a formidable ordeal. The narrator as ‘memory hunter’ is not prepared for her ‘prey’, for the hearing of the confessions that await her. The truth that unfolds—betrayals in the distant past that lead up to murders—are clearly too hard to bear. The memory hunter’s ‘imagination of truth’— a paradoxical compound noun of Mihkelson’s own invention – is shot to pieces in the end. However, the writer cannot pronounce unambiguous judgment on what has happened: what hinders her is the justification given for the betrayals: at a time when making ethical choices was impossible, people needed to provide the next generation safety and security. Trivial, self-justifying sentences such as, “Everyone wanted to live. Let whoever has no sin throw the first stone” are thus given specific, painfully personal content.

The story told in the novel is not in itself that complicated: what makes the novel difficult is the impossibility of giving simple, one-dimensional explanations. Mihkelson`s purpose is to question trivializing interpretations of history, clichés, and class differences. To accomplish this, the novel calls upon analogies and digressions, which evoke the Baltic Germans, Jews, and identity issues both in earlier periods in Estonian history as well as the contemporary world.

Overall, a great issue . . .