THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH, cultural juggernaut in Estonia...deserves your eyeblinks

THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH
ANDRUS KIVIRÄHK (tr. Christopher Moseley)
Black Cat/Grove Press
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The runaway Estonian bestseller tells the imaginative and moving story of a boy tasked with preserving ancient traditions in the face of modernity.

Set in a fantastical version of medieval Estonia, The Man Who Spoke Snakish follows a young boy, Leemet, who lives with his hunter-gatherer family in the forest and is the last speaker of the ancient tongue of snakish, a language that allows its speakers to command all animals. But the forest is gradually emptying as more and more people leave to settle in villages, where they break their backs tilling the land to grow wheat for their "bread" (which Leemet has been told tastes horrible) and where they pray to a god very different from the spirits worshipped in the forest's sacred grove.

With lothario bears who wordlessly seduce women, a giant louse with a penchant for swimming, a legendary flying frog, and a young charismatic viper named Ints, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a totally inventive novel for readers of David Mitchell, Sjón, and Terry Pratchett.

I RECEIVED A COPY FROM MY SISTER AS A GIFT. THANK YOU!

My Review: Look at that list of comps! Those're huge shoes to fill. They were even huger ten years ago when this talky, slow-paced book came out.

Ten years on, how does the read hold up? I have to get rid of a lot of my books now that I'm unable to hold tree-books open any longer, and the tech aids to doing that are not usable in the tiny space I live in. So I'm revisiting a few I liked and then letting them go to new lovers.

My sister blew my mind by telling me, after I got this book from her, that our ancestry is part Estonian! I'm still in slight shock. I wonder if that's the reason I resonated on some core level to this fantastical, almost allegorical, tale of the end of the world and the birth of modernity. I'll never know but I'm leaning that way...the pace of the story is slow, builds on itself as characters...maybe the best ones not even human...sinuously glide, powerfully stomp, and ethereally appear at various times during Leemet's long defense of his doomed paradise.

In the best tradition of the fairy tale, the origin myth, Leemet's life is either impossibly long or Time isn't what we experience in our limited lives. As the relentless Germans, The Hansa in our terms, bring their crosses, their monasteries, and their god to Leemet's pagan world of bears that seduce the human women with the greatest of ease and our brother hominins who're blessed with tails. The retreating pagan world is beaten back deeper and deeper into the firest while humans chop it down to farm wheat for the Germans' awful-tasting "bread" that they feed to their monks. Leemet can't really understand the idea of "monks"—why would his fellow humabs long to be castrati to sing beautiful music for monks when snakish commands all nature to bend to Man's will? Why abandon the beautiful Ints, their viper-selves have been with humankind forever? But the pagans lose battles, endure slaughter (ethnic cleansing we'd call it if it happened now, with a side order of jihad) as their ways fall before the new world order.

Told in well-honed, pointedly crafted words, there's a sad miasma of regret in Kivirähk's tale of the essential human conflict: conquest, supplantation, genocidal destruction. There is no doubt that Kivirähk is not in favor of the new world being born, and is satirically critical of those who accept the yoke of becoming farmers for the foreigners. He satirizes the "but this is how we've always done things" crowd just as harshly, just as facetiously; the target is human nature in each snarky aside, each minatory judgment. (I'm a little anachronistic in using the sixteenth-century "minatory" but I don't know an older word for "threatening, scolding, accusing.")

I ate this story up, like the entire nation of Estonia did...it's their bestselling novel ever, there's a board game based on it, this is their country's Lord of the Rings only not so tedious. If there's anything I know about publishing, though, the failure to catch fire in the US market means it will be ten more years before we can even hope to see another Kivirähk title in translation. Too bad...this would make an *a*maz*ing* animated feature that would take Estonia and France, where its success was greater than the Anglophone world, by storm. That would've made a wide, smooth road for other works by this intense, inventive, talented world-builder.

Don't hesitate to get a copy of whatever edition you can best afford.