Category: Latvia

The river by Laura Vinogradova

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The river by Laura Vinogradova

Latvian fiction

Original title – Upe

Translator – Kaija Staumanis

Source – Personal copy

I passed 16 years of blogging yesterday, and this book is the perfect example of all I had in mind for this blog. Translated book, from a small press, from a female writer from a country with very few books translated into English. This book is the second in a triptych of books that Open Letter has just released from Latavia. In some way, this is the sort of book I love and have always championed, those sorts of tales that touch me as a reader. Laura Vinogradova is someone who started off with a business degree before discovering her passion for writing a few years ago. She then published a couple of children’s books before this, which was her first book for Adults. It was nominated for the European Literature Prize and shortlisted for the Latvian Book of the Year.

Rute sits on a small stool in front of the stove, her head resting between her knees and her hands submerged in a bowl of warm water. She’s washing dishes, slowly and clumsily. She’s used to having a dishwasher, and the plates slip out of her hands, the forks prick her fingers. She sets the clean dishes on the floor next to the stool. Then she picks up the bowl of water, now full of coffee grounds and bits of food, to dump it outside behind the house. She opens the door carefully, the full bowl in her hands, and stops, startled: a young woman is in the yard, a little boy stands at her side and another child kicking in her stomach. Rute doesn’t see this, but can sense it. The woman’s coat is fastened only over her breasts, her stomach stronger than the buttons, splitting the coat in two.

Rute arrives athr fathers little house in the countryside !

Anyway, the book follows the stories of two sisters, or is it the story of Rute, the sister who is left behind? Her sister, Dina, disappeared many years ago, and is only present in the book through the frequent letters written by Rute to her sister, which litter the book. In the book, we meet Rute, a woman who seems to be at a crossroads in her life as she points out she is now maybe the older sister, as she is now much older than her sister was when they were last together. She is in a relationship, but she has also discovered that her father, a man she never really knew, has passed away. She heads to the property he owns in a small village. This is where she meets the couple next door and their young son. But it is also where the reality of who her father is, a man her mother said was a waste of space, comes alive in the eyes of the couple, an odd couple of single mother and brother next door, and the man she thought she knew is not the man he is. Add to this her escape from the city and perhaps her own problems. This is what happens when you step outside your own typical life, look at someone else’s life, a past you never had, and wonder where you move forward. All this, along with the small house that later develops its own problems, prompts Rute to reassess her own life and future.

Dear sis!

I planted the dahlias. For you. I dug up the ground with a dull shovel and tore out the weeds. Matilde was right the soil here is all clay. But I planted the bulbs and did some thinking. Ten years. Do you still remember me? Or think of me? Are you planting dahlias for me, somewhere?

Life seems to happen on its own. I would’ve never guessed that I’d one day be planting dahlias at our dad’s house. Never. But life happens. In all kinds of ways.

Sis, I want to tell you about the river. About me in the river. It makes me tremble and shiver. It makes me laugh.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt this alive. The water is fairly clear by the dock. Deep. I can’t touch the bottom, I’d have to go under a bit. You can cross it in no time. If you want get a good swim in you have to kind of circle around. You can feel the current. If you let it, it’ll carry you, though I don’t know how far.

Sis! I want to stay in the river.

I wish you’d come back …

Love you.

One Rute’s letter toher sister long disappeared but she still writes to her !

Now this is what I call a small epic, a novella that feels like an epic work. It packs a lot into a small book. Loss of a sister, moving forward with a relationship, our parents, and our own vision. In our lives, all these are looked at in this very short novel. As I said, this is the type of novel I love: personal, heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and a gem that needs to be widely read. It reminded me of those early Peirene books from well over 15 years ago, books that can be read in the time it would take to watch a film, and in this case, will leave you with a lot more than most modern films do. This tugs at what makes us human as readers. Do you have a favourite novella that feels epic ?

 

Berlin by Andris Kuprišs

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Berlin by Andre Kuprišs

Latvian fiction

Original title – Berlin

Translator – Ian Gwin

Source – Personal copy

I brought this trio of books from. Open letter books just after I read about the withdrawal of the funding for so many great publishers in Translation. I had some other books preordered from different publishers. However, I had been keeping an eye on this collection before the announcement. I had this down if I was going by one of the three books that Open Letter calls a translator’s choice for a country. It reminds me of the Peter Owen series of books, which they released several years ago, featuring three books from each country per year. I think someone could run with this as a long-term project to build a collection of world literature, with the opportunity to acquire a selection of books from each country. I noticed after reading the collection that Andris Kuprišs holds a master’s degree in photography. I can tell the very short stories are like a wonderfully framed photo, a glimpse at a life, a moment.

He put his hand on her stomach, sliding it lower. With his fingers he found her hip bones and felt them. He brushed her left leg, his fingers sliding down to her shin, then back up, his fingertips resting just above her knees.

“You were away when it happened. He was already drunk when he got here, the door was unlocked that night. At first I wanted to tell him to leave, but he insisted he had something important to tell me. He asked me to pour him a drink, so I let him have the last of the whiskey from my birthday. We satin the kitchen until I finally said something, that it was time for him to get going, but he just sat there, listening and slowly drinking. I said he had to hurry up because you were coming home soon, and he said I had nothing to worry about because he knew that night you weren’t.”

He had stopped caressing her and was sweating again.

A woman recounts something thagt happened in the story The Rape

The collection now comprises 19 short stories and a novella titled Berlin. I will leave Berlin to you, a reader, to say that it captures the expat experience in that city. If you are from the Baltic states, the rest of the collection is also set there. So, the rest of the book is composed of a collection of short stories and what may be flash fiction. A couple are in bed as the woman tells the man about what had happened whilst he was away. A friend, drunk at the time, came into the flat when she invited him in, she tells her partner. Then she says she couldn’t get away after she had let him in. This is a theme that runs in some of the stories, unease another sees a young boy fearful of answering a ringing phone. The short pieces are like little gems. How do we view someone in two ways? Why are his hands cold?

The first way in which the following situation differs from an-other, similar situation, is that I met him—a person I respect and regard quite highly—here, where I figured I would never have met him at all.

The second way, no less important to this situation, but perhaps far more important than the first, is that just as I went to shake his hand and ask him what he was doing here, he took me by the hair and forced me down. I fell to my knees, my face nearly touching the ground, him angrily saying almost shouting-“Learn humility!”

From the story two way in. which the following situation differs

Again a play with duality of life here in this flash fiction piece

There is a pervasive sense of sorrow and melancholy throughout this collection. It is a series of stories about the darker side or the underside of life. Being maybe an outsider in a town, and how that affects you moving forward. I also said this is like a collection of black-and-white photos. I wonder if that was his medium in photography, where the world is very black and white, with shadows and a feeling of gloom over the world we visit. He also plays with two characters interacting at the heart of some of the stories, which is that interplay and the way power and mood can shift between them. Whether it is a teacher and student, parents and their children, lovers in bed, or a man awakens in a bed and the man next to him thinks he is Jesus (I remembered the NYRB book about The Three Jesuses of Ypsilanti). Do you have a favourite book from the Baltic states?

 

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

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Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

Latvian fiction

Original title – Mātes piens.

Translator – Margita Gailitis

Source – review copy

Rather late getting to this one as I await the first title from this years Peirene selection I looked back and last year I hadn’t reviewed one of there books which is a great shame as I have covered most of there books from the first three in year one. Anyway, this is written by the Latvian writer Studied in Latvia then moved to New York to finish her studies. She on her return to Latvia set up the Latvian literature centre and started writing herself she has published over twenty books and has had two translated into English this is her first novel translated to English she also has a short story collection in English life stories is available still.

I don’t remember 15 october 1969. There are people who swear they remember their birth. I don’t. It’s likely that I was well positioned in my mothers womb, because the birth was normal. Not particularly long, or particularly short, with the last contractions coming every five minutes. My mother was twenty five, young and healthy. Her mental state, though was not so healthy, as I learned later.

I do remember , or at least I can picture, the golden, tender calm of October, alternating with forebodings of a long peri=oid of darkness. It’s a kind of boundary month, at least in the climate of this latitude, where seasons change slowly and autumn only graduallly gives way to winter.

The opening liunes as the daughter remembers the autumn month but not her own entering to the world!

I read this first last year and struggled to get into it and thus left it unreviewed but when stuck the other day with a feeling of nothing grabbing me I’d started half dozen books and got thirty pages in and lost interest. But this time I was really grabbed by the voice of the daughter describing her mother and then got the book the nameless narrators tell the stories in flipping narratives the daughter born in 1969 both mother and daughter born in the same month twenty-five years apart. The daughter growing under the Brezhnev regime her mother never feed her on the breast leading to her hating milk. Milk is a recurring motif in the book. The relationship is strained the, mother a tough woman in her story we see how she ended up in a small town a doctor but not allowed to [ratice in the field she studied which is birth and is a researcher on the effects on woman when she tries to help an abused wife and is banished because her husband was a ranking Soviet figure to be a simple country GP all this is told in her story the daughter only sees her mother now a broken woman she struggles to be herself her mother loves western books reads the poorly type books those Samizdat works will these two ever get what they want from their lives and even get to leave the village.

The river was warm as milk. Only late at night could it providerelief from the sweltering heat. The days felt interminable; the short night brought the balm of darkness. At the end of July the ambulatory centre was closed for a month. I began a long, lonely, senseless time. I lay naked in my shadow-filed room,trying to kill the nights and days.

A use of milk her as the description of the river.

I loved the unnamed narrators as their tale is not just a personal story but the tale of the whole under a regime where people could see their dreams destroyed in a single moment. The common theme in Peirene books over the years of the mother-daughter relationship, in this case, is even given a third fold as the state in Soviet times view its self as a mother and the milk they feed some of its citizens was bitter at times leads to  motif of milk from the mother not feeding the daughter milk  but to the daughter not having milk at school the theme of milk is recurring I felt a comradeship with the daughter not drink milk my whole life I get the hatred of this pure white liquid that maybe like its Soviet regime isn’t pure or white is just an emulsion of fat and water very apt for the regime !. I enjoyed this and it was a great intro to Latvian fiction as this is my first book from Lativa having reviewed books from the other Baltic states  I know have the last one covered by this book. It does what it says for the series and shows who even thou the two are at home they aren’t as there home is a  world they can’t get to under the soviet shackle.