Five Fingers was the winner of the 2013 Annual Latvian Literature Award for Best Prose. It is a fictionalised childhood memoir in which the author describes her family's return from Siberia in the 1950s and life in Latvia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the 2015 Annual Latvian Literature Award. The novel deals with the post-war period and follows the destinies of three generations of women, with the narrative focused mostly on the 1970s and 1980s. The mother, whose own mother has raised her without her real father, is a talented gynecologist who cannot accept the narrow space allotted to the individual by communist ideology. During her residency in Leningrad, she successfully – and in secret – performs an artificial insemination procedure on a young Russian woman, but the woman loses the child in a confrontation with the woman’s brutal husband, who is a war veteran. The path to science is now blocked for the talented doctor and she is reassigned to workin a small country village. She takes along her daughter, who is now deprived of the loving care of her grandparents.
The novel High Tide addresses the question of why we are so dependent on the past, even when it has turned us into someone else. In the beginning, they were two. They have no values, no horizontals or verticals, and have to create their own. They joke that if something bad happens, they’ll help each other end it all. And then something bad does happen. The boy gets sick, and the girl has to kill him. This “killing” turns out to be completely different from what you might see in movies or on stage. Everything turns out to be false, awkward, and horrible. Time goes on. One day, the middle-aged woman realizes she no longer knows whether what happened a long time ago really happened. Who were those two people who once lived together? Who was that girl who killed her boyfriend? Did he even exist if she only remembers him a couple times a year? She has nobody to talk to about it. So she writes, searching for an answer to the question: How many lives do we live in a single lifetime?
Winner of the 2017 European Union Prize for Literature and a nominee for the 2014 Annual Latvian Literature Award, this novel is a about the birth of the national consciousness of the Latvian nation, one generation of the nation’s teachers, the courage to oppose the insanity of violence and the consequences of failing to prevail over personal fear. It is 1905 in Riga, a city rocked by workers’ riots, violence, and pogroms during the waning days of the Russian Empire, when the Tsar is gradually losing his grip over his vast domain. Revolution is in the air – brother pitted against brother, social unrest and turmoil force people to choose sides. Amid this upheaval, a former schoolteacher becomes involved in the revolution, but soon realizes that the impending war is bound to require more of him than he is willing to give.
The first part of Anna Brigadere’s autobiographical trilogy 'God. Nature. Work' is a psychologically nuanced portrayal of a servant girl named Annele and the way her character develops as she comes to understand the world around her. This story reflects the author’s own childhood memories, of when she first learned about the word of God, the natural world around her, and everyday work. Annele comes from a servant family. Each year on Jurģi (St. George’s Day) they move to a new home and therefore also into a new world. The people she encounters leave a considerable impression on Annele. As she comes to understand life’s truths and encounters injustice, so she begins to grow up. She learns about holiday traditions and the patterns – as well as, in her opinion, the oddities – of adult life.
His novel Golden Girl is harsh and direct, in contrast with the rest of his work. The main character, Anna Zeltenīte, is a seamstress living on the outskirts of the city. The novel describes the tragic events in the final year of her life, as she falls hopelessly in love with an undeserving lad working at a factory. Anna is not dissimilar to Don Quixote in her role as a “good character” struggling against the evil world. The novel is filled with images of everyday material poverty, as well as the intellectual emptiness of the lives of the workers and other common folk with their cynicism and broken dreams – all of it commonplace in the world in which the author lived.
The Pearl Diver, which the author described as fantasy, is one of the earliest long prose works by Poruks. Its main character, Ansis, is from the countryside and comes to Rīga to study. He is passionate; a dreamer and an idealist. For Ansis, “pearl diving” means fulfilling your life’s goals: he wants to make his dreams come true, not just view them from a distance. But his life takes some difficult turns: his mother dies, he is unlucky in love, and he struggles with loneliness and, of course, the possibility that the world will never understand him. Ansis has no shortage of benefactors, including his mentor Talheims, his beloved Anna, and others. As the story progresses, Rīga comes to discover Ansis’s unique nature and he begins to meet new people. The moral of the story is that every reader has to find the “pearls” in their own life (there is also a theory that Poruks used “pearls” to refer to the hearts of good people).
At the beginning of the novel The Farmer and the Devil, the retired Latvian army officer Krasts is building his new farm. Together with his wife Aina and her father Andrāns, he works tirelessly to complete it, turning the surrounding spruce forest into pastures and putting up new farm buildings. However, a devil, a figure in Latvian tradition who is more of a trickster than a diabolical villain, has lived in this part of the forest for centuries and is angered by the destruction of his home, so he directs a series of misfortunes at the farmer – a beautiful woman named Manga, lack of money, etc. – to try and make him leave. At first the farmer is somewhat susceptible to the devil’s temptations, but in the end he pulls himself together and defeats them, so that good triumphs after all at the end of the novel.
Jaunsudrabiņš’ trilogy Aija (1911–1924) follows the life of a man named Jānis. In the first novel, he is a fifteen-year-old servant boy working as a cowherd at a wealthy farm, who falls in love with the slightly older Aija, a maid at the main house. Aija flirts with Jānis but is more interested in an advantageous marriage than in this cowherd’s love and marries a wealthy, middle-aged cobbler. Jānis is crushed and sets out for Rīga, where he works in various factories so that – in the second part of the trilogy – he is able return to his childhood home by the time he is thirty, to help out on the farm. Jānis falls in love with Ieva, who was just a little girl in the first book but has grown into a beautiful young woman and is also working as a maid. Jānis tries to use this new love to get over his earlier infatuation with Aija, whose husband has since died. He is not successful, and is thrown into an existential crisis, though this crisis is ultimately resolved when Jānis marries Aija.
Augusts Sveilis Jr., the oldest son of a poor small-town tailor, is at the centre of the story in Gold. He and his family are tested suddenly and unexpectedly when Augusts, working as a servant, receives an inheritance from his mistress. The inheritance leads him (and his family) into a completely unfamiliar environment, one they had previously only seen from a distance. In this world, commercialism, intrigue, and the excesses of Rīga’s Latvian bourgeois inhabitants are everywhere. Here the slogan “Gold is life, gold is freedom, gold is everything” rules. Symbols of the era – shops or many types of goods, a car, and the bourgeois social circles of big-city Latvia – reveal the magical power of money, against which their country / small-town morals turn out to be powerless.
Woman was Andrejs Upīts’ first significant novel and has been republished numerous times and widely discussed. It was the work with which he first gained notoriety in Latvian literature. When it was published, he had only recently left his teaching position, and the book’s popularity allowed him to turn his full attention to writing. Critics consider the change of setting – from the countryside to the city (i.e., from an environment which tends towards complete order to an environment where absolute chaos is a constant) – as the greatest influence Sieviete and other works by Upīts around the same time had on Latvian literature. These works brought radical changes to the principles of Latvian novel writing.
Though Straumēni is written in prose, Virza called this work a long poem. Using a Neo-Classical approach, the author tells a story set in the 19th century, on a country homestead in the southern region of Zemgale. At the heart of this work are the author’s childhood memories and the stories he heard from his grandparents about the idyllic life of Latvian peasants. The world depicted in this book is imbued with a mythical sensibility, the yearly cycles described in it involving people as well as other living creatures. Along with work and responsibilities, the rhythms of nature and the mind change with the passage of time. For example, the entire household participates in growing and harvesting flax, and the linen fabric – which is a product of this work – serves as a symbol of unity for the people of Straumēni. Therefore, this process and its result must come from the entire family’s shared labour.
Aspazija’s poetry is written in the romantic poetic style and contains many of the ideas prominent at the time, as well as themes focusing on self-knowledge and self-awareness. Aspazija was deeply and vocally involved in the campaign for women’s rights and in disputes concerning women’s emancipation and education.
The End and the Beginning is considered Rainis’s most significant poetry collection. It forms a conceptual whole and the phrase connecting each section – “I flow, I flow” – reflects notions of continuous motion, renewal, and transformation.
