The Cut Line by Caroline Pihelgas

The cut line by Carolina Pihelgas

Estonian fiction

Original title – Lõikejoon

Translator – Darcy Hurford

Source – Review copy

I was pleased to receive this from World Editions, as the two books I have previously reviewed from Estonia have been by male writers, so it is great to have a female voice.  Carolina Pihelgas is also a poet and is considered one of the best prose writers by Estonian Literary magazine Sirp, according to Estonian critic Piret Põldver.  Her previous novel had focused on three mother-daughter relationships.  Prior to that, she was a well-known poet.  This book marked a change in her writng style, as it focuses on the main character, Liine, who has moved to the countryside to escape and recover from the end of her 14-year toxic relationship.  This is her first book to be translated into English.

A large fly waddles across the outhouse wall, drowsy and content. I am the large fly’s antagonist. I take a chair outside but only sit there for a moment as I can’t keep still. I grab my gardening gloves and begin pulling the weeds out from around the flowering quince.

I haven’t done any weeding for years, but I discover that nettles are the nicest; pulling them out by the roots feels so agreeable. Dandelions are annoying, whereas ground elder is easy to pull out. Perhaps you only let me go without much of a fight because you don’t believe I’ll stay here longer than just a weekend.

You probably don’t believe I have any right to break up with you. I’m just like a part of your body you feel incomplete without. But what do I feel? Right now simply panic, I guess. Id known for a long time that I needed to get away, but also that you wouldn’t let me go that easily, that it was the departure that scared me the most, the anger and rage that would start building up inside you, swelling and swelling and then exploding and pushing their nasty roots inside me. I’m afraid that when I turn on my phone the day after tomorrow to connect my laptop to the internet-be-cause it’ll be Monday and I’ll need to start answering work emails-that there’ll be messages from you

The sense of disconnect initally from the toxic past

We follow as Liine heads to a remote cottage to escape the relationship she has just got out of after fourteen years. What follows is a woman recovering from Trauma. But also have to struggle in the present as there is a sense of the current situation in the Baltic states, as the Miliitary are around the sense of the horrific past of the country itself, the soviet damage of this land is still there what we get is a poetic look at a women sloly rebuilding her life in Nature but also as she does we get small glimpse into the poast of those fourteen years how her relationship became toxic.  The book depicts a grieving, cleansing process in her world as she lives a rural life far removed from her city life. She has escaped to this rural wilderness, but as she does, the tension in the country is heightened by constant troop movements and exercises. As we see her dealing with anger, then recovery, as the world around her darkens.

It comes from deep within, an anger I’ve never dared to feel before. It’s a wild feeling of injustice that I’ve been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn’t deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won’t fight back.

Why didn’t I fight back? Why did I put up with it all?

I’m mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment.

That’s another thing that’s been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn’t you leave sooner? Stop.

The anger that comes later when the past becomes clearer

This book, for me, captured trauma, but also the death of a relationship, the grief and anger, the way we all deal with moving on.  There is a fragmentary nature to the past as we see glimpses of memories, the snapshots of fourteen years in little bursts of how a relationship soured and became so toxic over the years. It is done in the way you feel the writer herself has gon through or knows someone close who has gone through this process. The anger, the loss, and the realisation of what has happened fully hit her. The way the past creeps up when the stillness and slowing down of her life and the routines of nature capture her. I was reminded of Thoreau in his cabin; by escaping the world, he saw how life is, and here we see Liine slowly seeing life in full again. In parts, I was also reminded of The River by Laure Vinogrodova, the Latvian novel I read last year. Both see female characters travelling to the countryside and seeing the world differently; they also deal with environmental issues in their respective countries. But what Crolina also does so well is capture the current tension of the Russian threat, which has grown much closer since the start of the Ukrainian war, and Putin could turn his attention to the Baltic states; this is shown by the NATO troops in the book. Have you read this or any other books from Estoniaxxsssssss

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