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.

QUILTBAG ROUNDUP: LAST NIGHT IN NUUK; THE BOOK OF AWESOME QUEER HEROES: How the LGBTQ+ Community Changed the World for the Better; OUR EVENINGS

OUR EVENINGS
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

LONGLISTED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...the shortlist of six will be announced on 7 April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Vignettes from the privileged and fortunate life of a mixed-"race" (useless term, divisive and ill-defined, but lacking an appropriate alternative one here) queer man and his circle of friends of his youth as they move through the stages of life, change partners, grow, and grow old, in the UK of our recent past.

Details are as synopsized by the publisher above; my reading of it was undertaken because Author Hollinghurst has never failed to give me the very agreeable experience of following him through a logical and internally consistent plot led by the loveliest sentences creating relatable, heightened-into-beauty situations and images.

Job done again. I'm in the contented majority of readers who felt well-served by this outing (!) into Hollinghurst's familiar-but-better reality. I even had the thoroughly unpleasant duty of feeling the humanity of a political-right radical and Brexiteer.

Enjoyable, all of it, but not new or freshly imagined by the author of The Line of Beauty, hence that missing half-star.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


THE BOOK OF AWESOME QUEER HEROES: How the LGBTQ+ Community Changed the World for the Better
ERIC ROSSWOOD, KATHLEEN ARCHAMBEAU, KATE KENDELL, Esq.
Mango (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have changed the world into the one we know and love in this riveting history book.

Historic Icons in the LGBTQ+ Community

Discover how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have changed the world into the one we know and love in this riveting history book.

Pride across the ages. The LGBTQ+ community has made countless positive impacts throughout history as scientists, world leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs, and each one of them deserves to be celebrated in The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes. Going into the history and achievements of famous queer icons, this LGBTQ+ book is a love letter to those who have brought love, positivity, and advancement into our society. Let author and activist Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau guide your discovery of amazing facts about each historical figure and how their lives have shaped ours in more ways than one.

How they are still inspiring us today. The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes doesn’t just cover what so many LGBTQ+ people have accomplished; it also shares how we can achieve our dreams by learning from their persistence. Learn about activists such as Marsha P. Johnson, X González, Sylvia Rivera and many more in their fight for progressive change against discrimination.

Meet heroes and world-changers you may have heard of, with biographies about:

Star athletes such as Esera Tuaolo and Billie Jean King
Entertainers like Sir Elton John, Margaret Cho, Daniela Vega, and RuPaul
Government and military officials such as Eric Fanning and Leo Varadkar
Trailblazers in science and technology including, Alan Turing and Lynn Conway
Other historic icons like Oscar Wilde and Bayard Rustin

If you enjoy LGBTQ+ books and memoirs such as Hollywood Pride, The House of Hidden Meaning, or Karma, then you’ll love The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I deliberately left publishing this review until after Yule because, I'm sad to say, there are families (of a sort) where a young adult could be in trouble if this book was given to them. I still think any queer kid over, say, thirteen would hugely benefit from receiving this book as a way of being reassured that they're not the first queer person, nor the only one who had a tough road to follow into adulthood.

Brief biographical sketches and images of the ancestors of their own people will encourage a young soul in need of the security and reassurance of belonging to a lineage.

At under $15, the modest price will more than repay your investment in a young queer kid's anchor into reality. I don't know how much longer these books will be available, so I'll recommend this one as a gift to give now while They still don't make it ever-harder to procure.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



LAST NIGHT IN NUUK
NIVIAQ KORNELIUSSEN
Black Cat/Grove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty and fearless debut from a stunning new voice, Last Night in Nuuk is a work of daring invention about young life in Greenland. Through monologues, emails, and text exchanges, she brilliantly weaves together the coming of age of five distinct characters: a woman who’s “gone off sausage” (men); her brother, in a secret affair with a powerful married man; a lesbian couple confronting an important transition; and the troubled young woman who forces them all to face their fears. With vibrant imagery and daring prose, Korneliussen writes honestly about finding yourself and growing into the person you were meant to be. Praised for creating “its own genre” (Politiken, Denmark), Last Night in Nuuk is a brave entrance onto the literary scene and establishes her as a voice that cannot be ignored.

I RECEIVED A COPY AS A GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: I got one of these eight years ago from a friend now vanished into the internet's anonymity. I'd heard of it on Lambda Literary's reviews site.

There's always a novelty factor when someone from a place less frequented (to self-centered monoglot Anglophone readers) writes about their home place. It's new, it's fresh, it isn't a place you went on holiday in your teens. Extra exciting when the author's somewhere on the QUILTBAG spectrum and sets a queer story of five people in different gradations of outness in a place where that is not the first thing that comes to mind as a probability.

I had never once in my life considered the presence of QUILTBAG culture existing at all in Greenland.

A book of stories about different members of that community, deeply enmeshed in each others' lives, felt irresistible, and I was eager to dive in...then Life got in the way, my treebooks got relocated for me (much against my will), and it never happened until now. This is my last read of 2024. It's not a fat book so I thought it might be okay for me to hold.

Not a good choice. Much pain, three days to read under two hundred pages, an actual new gouty tophus formed from the exercise.

Yet I heartily enjoyed the novelty factor, I was on board with the use of this generation's epistolary style of texts and emails and social-media posts, since the characters are all young adults and this is their cultural landscape. Their landscape overlapped with mine of the same era in my life with its deeply predictable drunken sex and bewildering rage coming at them from unexpected places, aka bullying.

I don't think I'd've loved it more if I'd read it in '18. I didn't adore it now. I fell under its spell of novelty, enjoyed the reminder of how very powerful a force lust was in my past and how much fun it all was, and in the end was mildly glad I'd read it.

Won't pick it up again, will put it in the Little Free Library come spring, and might read the author's next book.

Equally might not.

Either outcome is fine.

BLUE LIGHT HOURS, first novel by established literary luminary of translation

BLUE LIGHT HOURS
BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO
Grove Press/Black Cat
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: of a young Brazilian woman’s first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A tight, compact barely-more-than-novella based on the author's fiction debut story. She's translated work from Brazilian that I've loved (The Words That Remain) and liked a lot (Moldy Strawberries), so I was primed for a good experience. I got that indeed.

Loneliness and that indescribable parent-feeling compounded of intense longing for the child you've had every day of their life as your primary focus mixed with huge dollops of pride in their accomplisment that's led them away from you, and the freezing fear of what you know can and will happen to hurt them where you just can't be. And, of course, resentment that this stellar being needs to be so far away to feel grown up. I was pleased that the author's stand-in was so dutiful and so genuinely, if sometimes impatiently, loving toward her mother in their long-distance relationship.

If you have, or were, a child, it's going to speak to you. It's told mostly from the author-placeholder's PoV, but we do hear directly from her mother at the end. It will sound, and feel, familiar to older folks. It will offer some insights to younger ones. It will do all this without leaving you feeling Taught. I am morally certain Author Lobato has been in this exact skin, it fits the reader so well.

Why I recommend it to you now is the fall has fallen, there's chill in our Northern Hemisphere air, trees are coloring up, and that's the time for a hot steaming mug for sipping and a long sleeve for sniffling into. You'll do a lot of both of 'em.

I'd offer a fifth star had the ending not felt like it was given a mildly short shrift. It's not bad, it's organic to the story, it's just not quite enough for a full, complete experience of her mother's part of their life.

A first novel made from Life, and grown from a short story could not hope for a better apotheosis. This will not, I hope, be the last work of her own long fiction Author Lobato publishes. Those will feel even more accomplished.