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.

POOR DEER, second novel by Claire Oshetsky of CHOUETTE fame

POOR DEER
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco(Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

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

My Review: What dies when a child dies? A parent dies thousands of deaths while their child is alive: fear, worry, the desperate pride in the pain that they suffer because of the child’s process of individuation from the Terrible Twos to *shudder* adolescence, or the death of a thousand cuts as I describe it; the death of the child is, however, the absence of these once-suffered pains, now become the hideous trackless void of grief. Many, maybe most, suffering parents turn to some sort of formal ritualized observance. The difference is of kind, not sort. Whether they choose religious, or secular, fellowship they seek comfort based in groups that cater for the vast needs of those grieving. But the dead child’s peers, lacking the perspective of adults, do not have the same outlets for their intense and passionate feelings.

Margaret, after the death of her best friend and neighbor Ruby, has developed versions of many of these coping behaviors: chanting, counting, seeking and seeing omens. Her mother makes the error common to many parents of her station and low educational attainment, using threats and bullying to keep Margaret in line. The result is predictable to the reader.

Margaret uses fantasy to put her feelings into tolerable emotional perspective. Her world is made up of adults who strive...I’d say "struggle" but they would never agree to such a freighted negative term...just to make some semblance of a life. Thus they, and Margaret, are always under tremendous stresses from many angles. The usual suspect for their adult coping mechanism in this kind of toxic soup is some religious and/or spiritual system, either mainstream or off the beaten path. Margaret’s mother and aunt, with whom she lives in their childhood home, are of the very old-fashioned Old Testament christian believers ilk. Her own coping mechanism is, as expected, in alignment with that kind of belief system, though its substance is not christian looking.

Given all the above, it makes sense that Margaret makes her grief, guilt...what religious system works without guilt?...and shame into an entity that judges and abuses her. That it was Poor Deer, an animal spirit named with the often overheard characterization of Margaret that she reimagines, was inspired. Different in affect, the same in effect. All of it was hard for my similarly afflicted self to read. Did Margaret cause her best friend Ruby’s death? contribute to it? or is Margaret simply a child whose always turbulent emotional world has been completely upended by a tragedy she has no framework to process, to get any kind of handle on? Since we meet Margaret and Poor Deer, that animal spirit aforementioned, as the latter has finally bullied the former into writing a confession of her guilt...for what? I wondered what can a child really be held resonsible for?...we are never on solid narrative ground.

I contend we never get there. This is, for me as a reader, a feature not a bug.

Margaret is an unusually bright person. Her coping mechanisms all fill the places that more intelligent, more emotionally adept parent figures...no father anywhere to be seen...would have resulted in her finding a direction forward into her life, instead of circling endlessly the disfiguring self-doubt and suspicion she swims through daily. Margaret creates, or finds, or discovers Poor Deer to fulfil the role of cicerone, mentor, and conscience.

Poor Deer is a story. All of us live out stories. Margaret has built her own world of stories because she can control them, can make sense of them, can mold them into the kind of purposeful, positive paths that she has so sorely lacked. So is this a story about how awful a childhood this one girl has led? Are we expected to follow this path from tragedy to mental illness then just...go on about our day?

If you haven’t read Chouette, you might wonder. Author Claire does not Do pointless suffering. Suffering you will do. There is, in fact, a Point. That we come to the end of the story in a manner not wholly predictable is just the expected way Author Claire works. That we come to the end of Margaret’s childhood without the sense of being smothered in a bow tied around our readerly eyes as we face the firing squad of Predictability’s story soldiers is vintage Author Claire.

Does childhood end? Do we wake up one fine day all adulty and fully prepared for life? Are you kidding? Margaret doesn’t do that either, she slugs it out with demons internal and external, and Margaret...becomes Margaret. You are investing in the journey into selfhood of a person who survives her life and becomes herself. It is a journey that never, ever grows less important or less lonely. Going with Margaret, whose beginnings reminded me a great deal of my own, on her trip through the story she and Poor Deer massage into ever evolving shapes and sizes as needed, left me very rough at the end of the book.

The spots I have polished into a high gloss by reinventing the stories I needed to survive got sanded down to the original story. Like Margaret, I didn’t grow up, I grew larger by reinvention. That process, once begun in survival mode, does not...can not...end.

All five stars.