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.

WITCH, HEALER, PRIESTESS, OUTCAST: Divine Feminine Archetypes for Modern Life

WITCH, HEALER, PRIESTESS, OUTCAST: Divine Feminine Archetypes for Modern Life
JULIE PETERS
Verbena(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Journey Through the Divine Feminine Archetypes of Goddesses and Mythic Figures

In Witch, Healer, Priestess, Outcast, explore original retellings of mythic figures and goddesses from around the world, discovering how to embrace both the dark and light aspects of life. Learn how embodying the power of witches, healers, priestesses, and outcasts can help you navigate your deepest emotions, reclaim your place in a fast-paced world, and bring new meaning to your experiences.

Drawing inspiration from the ancient tradition of oral storytelling, uncover forgotten figures whose tales may have been lost to time, yet have much to teach us about what it means to live as a woman fully empowered. Witch, Healer, Priestess, Outcast shines a new light on these lost figures, while offering fresh perspectives on those we know well. Each story is a chance to be inspired, and through guided meditations, you'll learn how to integrate that inspiration into your life.

Embrace the Divine Energy of Healing: Connect with an ancient lineage that honours the feminine power to nurture and heal.

Discover the Magick of Feminine Power: Explore the stories of Hekate and Morgan Le Fay to gain fresh insights into the enduring power of women—and how it has often been misunderstood.

Practical Exercises for Daily Growth: Integrate the power of the goddesses into your life with guided meditations that deepen your connection to each story's message and help you embody their transformative energy.

Step into your own divine power, awaken the wisdom of the goddesses, and begin your transformative journey today.

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

My Review: No, I don't believe in magic, or gods/powers/spirits as forces in the material world...if they're real, why's there so much awful crap happening (as there always is and always has been)? This is called the Problem of Evil. No one's posited an answer that survives the question.

This does not mean I'm not open to learning wisdom, however it's dressed, from those who came before us. The persistence of stories in the world means the best way to communicate wisdom is via that medium. Stories work best with clear characters, real conflicts, and resolutions to those conflicts...no matter how ambiguous. Read my review of The Swerve, or better still, the book.

This book's all-female archetypes of wisdom are handsomely represented in artwork, well-chosen to demonstrate the author's desired celebrated qualities:

The introductory matter, simple and concise, tells us we're going to go deep into the world of women's experiences, archetypes, and the wisdoms these impart. As the span of (recorded) history is mostly the record of misogyny and repression, that doesn't sound cheery.

It is, and it isn't. Without sugarcoating or avoiding the violence meted out by men, the images are gynocentric and the wisdom positive and constructive. Your young wiccan, budding feminist with a spiritual bent, or simply young woman void of course can use this book for encouragement, for assistance, and for the many pleasures of a beautiful object on its own.

Let's enjoy the art:

the loa get a look-in!

the Irish, too

mediterranean myths, anyone?

nordic ladies, here you go

Conclusions to be drawn...an inviting and trenchant way to absorb the wisdom of the women who keep the world running.

KIBOGO, latest treat from Scholastique Mukasonga AND A FINALIST for the National Book Award—Translated Literature!

KIBOGO
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Mark Polizzotti)
Archipelago Books
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION IN TRANSLATION FINALIST!

One of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022!

Rating: 6* of five It's my annual six-stars-of-five read!

The Publisher Says: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity.

When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.

Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.

To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?

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

My Review: Come and sit down. Settle in for a winter afternoon's pleasure-reading of someone else's culture's stories. This novella-in-stories is, in under 150pp or about three hours'-worth of reading, going to tell you about Rwanda. Not the country that threw itself a genocide in 1994. The foreign colony undergoing coerced christianization, the colonizers whose need for men and food to fight a war on another continent was the only thing they saw, the people of Ruanda-Urundi whose bodies and souls were the raw material and the means of production but never just themselves. What happens when Nature decides to withhold her usual munificence and deny Mankind her fecundity is always very, very educational to the mass of the people.

What Kibogo does, then, is tell you the stories of the people. They're funny, they're poignant, they're sometimes befuddlingly different from our Global Northern expectations. But they are alive, they sing on the pages of this book, they make their world felt and heard and seen through Author Scholastique Mukasonga's careful, gentle, unsparingly honest eyes. Translator Mark Polizzotti comes in for a heap of praise as well. I could hear Author Scholastique speaking to me, and he is the reason I wasn't slugging through the book with La Petite Larousse ten centimeters from my elbow at all times.

Kibogo is a god, a divine creature whose rule over Ruanda's people is challenged by the Catholic priests. If you know anything about that religion, the focus of worship is what they start with changing...Jesus, not Kibogo...while syncretizing as much of the pre-christian myth structure and storytelling architecture as possible. In the event, who's the god isn't always clear...it comes down to the name one calls when one is in extremis...and that name can surprise even the caller.

The worst part of believing in a super-natural being, a creature above the natural world we must perforce inhabit, is that there is always, always a loose end to tuck in, a wrinkled page to smooth out and make readable. When a man works to make this his life's gift to the world, he neglects the woman whose gift the world is in: No birth happens without a man and a woman agreeing to make it happen. The issues for the Ruandan god's bride and the Catholic church's groom grow urgent. Both seek a spirit, see a world for what it has and can be made into; the world, meanwhile, just Is. How can this end except in tears? Watch and learn, people without belief.

Or just follow Author Scholastique as she, seeming as bemused as the rest of us, watches the borning Rwandan African attempts to put flesh on the hollow bones of ancestral skulls. It is here that I felt the sting of tears as, not free of sarcasm, Author Scholastique offers up the flesh of a bumbling, pompous Western world in sacrifice to the simple, bright, carnivorous land we all must share. The land is the only god worth worshiping because it is the only god we can touch and who responds to us, who feeds our families and accepts our worn-out remains for its eventual reuse, recycling what can not be reduced more than it is by the myriad eating mouths and excreting guts of Life.

This was a rare, perfect reading experience for me. It came exactly when I wanted and needed it. It answered some call I made, unknowing, as I looked for a reason for winter's cold and brilliance not to weigh me down. Thank you for it, Author Scholatique, Translator Polizzotti, and Archipelago Books via Edelweiss+. Gifts of this great value come when they're most needed.