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.

THE CUT LINE, survival...contingent contentment...solitude

THE CUT LINE
CAROLINA PIHELGAS (tr. Darcy Hurford)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

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

My Review: Reckoning with the toxicity of Love is the most difficult emotional task I know of; it is the central concern of this story. In Liine's life there is no softness in the emotional gifts anyone around her grudgingly and contingently grants to her. She finally accepts her partner will never be a validating, accepting, kind force supporting her own betterment. Running away at last, she lands at a family property far from the city, where there is nothing much in the way of modern conveniences. She's also hounded...well...tracked down anyway by her family who think she should accept that her violent, withholding ex is as good as she'll ever get for a man to be with.

Been there, Liine.

Her stubborn resistance to submit to family or ex is rooted in her desire to survive, maybe begin to thrive. But there's a catch (of course there is): her rural haven is under severe stress from climate change; and it's very close to a NATO base provocatively situated close to Estonia's border with Russia, their former colonial power. Liine might have leapt out of the frying pan but it looks like the fire is fast approaching.

Her willingness to work hard is barely keeping her even with the environmental changes; her emotional healing work is under siege from the perfidious ex's smear campaign in their friend circle (after a breakup, Liine, walk away and let those who care follow you; those who don't are not your friends), and her family's pressure to go back; the NATO base is constantly "testing" ie exploding weapons in a cacophonous assault on nature. An environment that does not support her much-needed self-repair work. So what else is new.

It sounds very challenging, right? It really is; it really demands we invest in Liine to overcome her manifold obstacles to becoming herself, for herself, not answering to anyone else. If she can stay the course...if she can pull the heroic feat of self-reinvention off....

In under 150pp, you're not getting a full redemption arc. It's more a book about vibes, about being in the moment with the character. I was rooting for her to live each day, since she tells us directly that "at night I die several times" to make sure we get how intense the labor she does really is.

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.

That's a distillation of the work of recovery from abuse that can't be bettered.

What you're getting in this plunge-pool of a story is the dive not the swim. The ending isn't A Resolution; it's Liine committing herself to resolving the problems she came to sort out, to coping with the problems she has limited control over (nature, NATO), and being her own, real, honest self.

It is a gratifying story to read to me in this moment I'm making changes in my own life. It is not all tied up with a bow. That won't be to everyone's taste, some facets (eg going to her sister for...what? nothing happens) were not to mine. No perfect score from me; but a deep, enfolding read about a tough woman finding the strong core she needs to stand on while facing down the world.

And she does it for herself.