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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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      • Sad Little Autumn
        Fiction

        Sad Little Autumn

        by Mait Vaik

        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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