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      • Something Real
        Fiction

        Something Real

        by Martin Algus

        Inspired by true events and written as a dialogue between two men, Algus’s debut novel offers an opportunity to peer deep into the darkest currents of the human soul in today’s internet-entangled world. The story is captivating in such a horrifying way that one delves into the fi nest nuances almost unintentionally, envisioning minute details and experiencing fear as well as sympathy in situations into which one might otherwise never have thought of putting themselves, much less expecting to understand them. Something Real is an intense expedition that plunges the reader into issues of loneliness, foolishness, greed, as well as simple chance and curiosity. The shadowy world of the internet gives one of the characters – a young man recently released from prison – the abhorrent idea to use his young stepdaughter to lure perverts out of the murkiest layers of the web. A middle-aged man who is fed up with his marriage and is a regular patron of porn sites takes the expertly-placed bait, starts chatting with the young girl offering sexual services, and ultimately asks to meet. Once he arrives, the man finds himself staged to be guilty of statutory rape. He falls into the blackmailer’s disgusting trap, though he soon discovers that many others have taken the ever-younger internet bait as well – some of them genuine monsters. The men’s alternating perspectives of the escalating situation only add tension as the plot arrives at critical, odious, unnerving, and unexpected twists. Algus depicts what is inarguably a filthy version of reality – addictions, extortion, fear, cruelty – but in doing so, he somehow manages to show its polar opposite of caring and despair. One reviewer called the drama of disquiet ‘as sharp as a razor blade’ – keen, precise, masterful, and cutting to the core of what is true. The keywords cinema, universality, and contemporaneity can also be applied. Algus himself has asked: ‘If we spend more and more of our days in a virtual state, what will it do to us over time?’ Justifiably, he has also asserted that every topic in the work realistically exists in Estonia and the greater world right now.

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      • What It Feels Like for a Girl
        Fiction

        What It Feels Like for a Girl

        by Eia Uus

        The female body stands at the core of Eia Uus’s newest novel. It is a book that speaks to women and may irritate many men, as the author states frank, unvarnished truths about what life is like for a woman in our masculine world. At the same time, Uus does not clearly demarcate gender roles. The story is set in motion by a party at which the narrator Lilian, still reeling from losing her job, meets a woman close to half her age – Mona. Inexplicably, Mona stirs up erotic feelings in Lilian which gradually swell into nearly oppressive maternal instincts – or, perhaps, a selfish desire to sculpt a socially-acceptable companion for herself. Uus’s novel would be a modern Lolita or Pygmalion, were its mission not divergent and its social spectrum less expansive. Worked into the story are attractive and enterprising women’s attempts to break through the glass ceiling in the traditionally male-dominated world of PR and politics. It is a world that ingrains in women from a very young age the notion that they are inadequate. Accounts of sexual harassment inflicted upon the protagonist as a girl tend to recur, but there can never be too many of those stories – who has ever heard of a woman who knows no other woman who has suffered from harassment? That being said, the author’s storytelling style is in no way piteous or depressing – on the contrary, Uus’s book is written in a light, engaging manner; you could even say with zest. It is intimate, erotically charged, and at the same time grittily honest and acute. What It Feels Like for a Girl isn’t an enervated individual’s personal drama, but rather a concentrated portrait of a woman striving to understand the reactions which the female body provokes. It tells the untold stories of so many women – stories that have been buried beneath the feelings of guilt and shame that society forces upon them. Uus’s novel has sparked heated debates on a variety of topics in Estonia and contains ample material for many more.

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      • Autobiography: The First Two Weeks
        Fiction

        Autobiography: The First Two Weeks

        by David Vseviov

        One morning, the midwife Maria Ivanovna Sidorkina wakes up to her downstairs neighbor’s cries that Maria’s cat Barsik has killed a man. After an investigation by the Soviet militsiya, the grotesque morning (which lacked any human victim, regardless) transitions smoothly into a similarly absurd birthday party for Maria’s mother that is attended by terrible guests, and during which the woman’s husband Vassily makes a joke that falls horribly flat. To mitigate his wife’s displeasure, Vassily promises to start studying Estonian using the local newspapers. Thus, a Stalinist periodical with a peculiar attitude towards reality becomes their Estonian textbook. In 1944, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia for a second time in fewer than five years. Vseviov, an historian, depicts the ways enigmatic Russia strengthened its foothold in the country and how life profoundly transformed. Complemented by extensive photographic illustrations, the novel paints a picture of people’s everyday lives in Tallinn over the course of two spring weeks in 1949, shortly after the end of World War II. Newspaper-reading and the reporting of current affairs in a way loyal to the regime are central topics throughout the book. The narrator of Autobiography is a precocious newborn who comments on the situation from his own unusual perspective. One major setting in the novel is the multinational hospital maternity ward, which brings together the stories of women born all across the Soviet Union who have relocated to Estonia. In the second week, the infant moves home to a room in a communal apartment in the city center, where the mother receives visitors with stories that are just as fascinating. The protagonist is born into a mixed Estonian- and Russian-Jewish family; the languages spoken at home also include German and French. This crossroads of cultures and conflicts doesn’t necessarily entail collisions alone, but also queer cultural intertwining and interpretations. The humorous parallel reality conjured up by the newspaper articles (which an alarming number of the Soviet-minded characters do not doubt in the very least) highlights, in fact, the grotesque that could be found in those terrifying years – an era of genuine fear. The reality of Stalinism in Soviet Estonia is woven into the author’s historically accurate yet exaggerated characters. Reviewers have called Vseviov’s Autobiography an historically and politically comedic work of reference. At the same time, it is a high-spirited parody of autobiographies. The tiny narrator discovers parallels with events that will occur later in life, relating episodes with roots that extend (sometimes mockingly, other times with dire seriousness) into these first two weeks. The nature of compulsory Soviet military service, for example, is revealed all in its unadulterated absurdity. Autobiography: The First Two Weeks stylistically resembles Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs.

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      • Polish Boys
        Fiction

        Polish Boys

        by Mudlum

        Polish Boys is a story of young bohemian-intellectuals who have settled in old dilapidated buildings and who follow their ideals. The novel is located in socialist Poland but space and time are irrelevant and can be seen as an allegory. Polish Boys is about the confidence of youth and about aspirations for beauty and truth, how high expectations meet reality, how some people bend and deviate and some donʼt. Adam, Sulisław, Teofilis and Jerzy grow up together and become influential figures in Warsawʼs art and literary circles. They set up the radical cultural newspaper Płaszcze and try to transform the society surrounding them. Their radicalism is challenged and not least by the convenient choices offered by the establishment. The same choices are present in their private lives: the unpredictability of free love or the security of a family. Polish Boys is a bildungsroman for the whole generation inspired by the cultural group ZA/UM in Estonia. The author, who was a member of the group, writes from her personal experience with warmth and compassion, which makes the novelʼs tonality both universal and human.

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      • The Ballet Master
        Fiction

        The Ballet Master

        by Urmas Vadi

        Vadi’s fantasy novel weaves a thrilling version of tumultuous years in Estonian history. When the Soviet Union occupied the Republic of Estonia in 1940, authorities deported the Estonian president Konstantin Päts and his family to Russia. When war broke out between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, he was arrested and imprisoned in various mental hospitals until his death in 1956. In Vadi’s novel, four men who have assumed false identities and are masquerading as a folk-dance troupe set out to free the president from the Kazan Asylum. Alas, as their journey commences, they don’t even know how to dance. Stitched into their folk costumes are said to be the secret codes the president needs to access his assets. One of the briefcases they were given contains a book on folk dancing. Needless to say, not all goes according to plan. Vadi originally wrote the story as a play that was staged in 2009, and later reworked it as a film script. The Ballet Master is indeed cinematically dynamic and theatrically multilayered, reminiscent of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The grotesque comedy partly centers around the president, who was a great historical figure, and otherwise follows the rescue squad made up of a fi re fighter and three potters: four entirely ordinary men who are meant to alter the course of history. The imposters board a train to Moscow from Tallinn and are forced to perform an improvised dance repertoire that very same evening in the dining car. The comical-yet-calculated creativity and mesmerizing quality of the men’s movements is detailed from their very first leaps – be it hopping on one foot with their arms crossed and trying to make the others lose their balance while “La Marseillaise” is played, or a dance called “Walk When the Devil’s on Your Heels”, which was they learned from a Moscow street urchin named Seryozha to help them survive in war or a metropolis. Peppered with ample references to Russian literary classics and fairy tales, the four men’s adventure through Russia is akin to an unpredictable Russian anecdote. The Ballet Master’s bizarre cast of semi-folkloric characters is colorful, including humans and animals alike. That said, deeper undertones are not absent at any point in the story. The characters’ fates, romances that flourish along the way, and betrayal that is committed are written with witty and concerned warmth from start to finish. Although they do not succeed in freeing the president, the magical tragicomedy (or black comedy) still has a happy ending in store for the dance troupe.

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      • The Horned Blue Beast
        Fiction

        The Horned Blue Beast

        by Andrus Kivirähk

        The Horned Blue Beast is a grotesque artist’s novel in which Estonian mythology is transformed into an untethered element of quotidian life. Dr. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald published the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg first in German, then in Estonian, in the mid-19th century. Kalevipoeg is something of a cornerstone work in the Estonian fine arts – its motifs echo in literature, art, and musical composition, and it laid the groundwork for the formation of national consciousness. In the 1910s, the young and talented Estonian artist Oskar Kallis, whose works blend art nouveaux and national romanticism, became the first to illustrate the epic. Kallis’s art brought about Kalevipoeg’s second coming and was a vividly-colored visual triumph for its hero of giant proportions. Kivirähk’s novel is a spellbinding interpretation of the creation of Kallis’s radiant illustrations. Written in diary format, the young artist conveys his semi-psychedelic encounters on the path to understanding Kalevipoeg. The protagonist doesn’t simply imagine the characters, but journeys alongside them in a mythological world while simultaneously growing distant from the real one – the streets of a harbor town preparing for a grim war. The epic’s oftentimes outrageous characters and their intrepid adventures literally clamor to be drawn and called into being for readers and appreciators of art. The ordinary world seems to stifle and fail to understand this, staying indifferent to the artist’s attempts to communicate the joys and spectrum of colors he finds in the mythological world. The artist’s wild, enchanting, and ultimately tragic story – one akin to a sensitive participatory experiment – poses the questions of how a person in the arts perceives the world and where the lines between the real world and their reality are drawn. By his final entries, the mirthful young man has turned into a full-fledged, bone-weary man whose last works of art are woven into topics far beyond his original absurd escapades – love and the quest for peace beyond the grave. Kallis died in early 1918 at the age of 25 on the Crimean Peninsula, where his teacher and romantic partner had him taken to recover from tuberculosis. Kallis had never left his hometown of Tallinn before arriving in Yalta, but his works – the creation of which Kivirähk has depicted in a clever and masterful way – were in close discourse with the finest artistic traditions of Europe and Scandinavia. Kivirähk’s powerful use of language brings the artist’s inner landscapes to life. The Horned Blue Beast is an uproarious tale which strums the deepest heartstrings – just as the author frequently does – and amazes the reader by how such a heartbreaking book can still be so cheerful.

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