Sad Little Autumn
by Mait Vaik
Description
Mait Vaik, who in addition to being a celebrated musician and the author of countless songs has stood out for his short prose, has written a curiously captivating book with Sad Little Autumn. The work is meticulously accurate (including his expert descriptions of various states of intoxication and the hangovers which follow) and conjures images of apathetic, angst-provoking emptiness. The author tasked himself with conveying sharply distressing emotions such as despair, hopelessness, ineluctability, and resignation. His male characters – fathers and sons; two middle-aged and two young – all find themselves in rather unenviable situations. One father is diagnosed with cancer; the other has been wading through the mires of alcoholism for years and finally reaches a point where he has given up seeking the way out. One son is a “functioning addict”; the other has been pushed into violent obsession by an ill-fated romance.
As such, Sad Little Autumn presents us with a brilliantly written quagmire; one both mental and physical. It is accompanied by the bleakness of dense Soviet apartment blocks (familiar from Mati Unt’s Estonian literary classic, The Autumn Ball) and the removed carelessness of superficially cozier new housing estates. Vaik paints these environments in a seemingly casual but still precise and enjoyable style, just as he does the weather – mostly gray Estonian autumn days in which daylight is in steady decline.
The men go about their depressing lives with defeated thoughts crowding their heads. Whenever they do communicate – to women, let’s say – then their attitudes are by and large irritable, almost or entirely unwilling to let conversation lead to a stillborn solution. Vaik’s purposeful cacophony of viewpoints requires the reader to stay on their toes if they want to keep track of whose head the author has jumped into now and whose story is being told. Nevertheless, as the author himself declares at the end, there is still happiness to be found in these characters penned by Estonia’s Houellebecq – or at least they do earn unexpected redemption in this life.
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Rights Information
Rights contact Ilvi Liive at estlit@estlit.ee
English sample available upon request
Author Biography
Since 1989, the writer and musician Mait Vaik (b. 1969) has played bass guitar in well-known alternative rock bands. His debut book Kõigil on alati õigus (Everyone Is Always Right, 2012) was a collection of poetry and lyrics.
Moving from song lyrics to prose brought the author almost instant success. The short story collection, reminiscent of a novella, Juss ja vennad (Yuss and Brothers, 2013) established Vaik, garnering a high commendation for a short story in 2015 – the Friedebert Tuglas Short Story Award. A year later, he was recognised for his new short story collection Meeleparanduseta (Unrepentant), with Estonia’s highest prose award, conveyed by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. Vaik’s first novel Kurvake sügis (Sad Little Autumn, 2018) was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2020.
Estonian Literature Centre
The Estonian Literature Centre (ELIC) exists to generate interest in Estonian literature abroad. ELIC organizes translation seminars and publishers’ fellowships, and coordinates the Translator-in-residence program in Estonia. ELIC has created a unique English language web site on Estonian writers and translators of Estonian literature and maintains a developing database of translations of Estonian literature. The web site and database can be accessed at: www.estlit.ee
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Puiestee
- Orginal LanguageEstonian
- ISBN/Identifier 9789949728220
- Publication Country or regionEstonia
- FormatHardback
- Pages302
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleKurvake sügis
- Original Language AuthorsEstonian
- Copyright Year2018
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