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.