Eldritch
07-12-2010, 09:46 PM
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POWER and loss are the themes of Sofi Oksanen's gripping novel, Purge, which brings to life two eras, one all but forgotten, and the other conveniently overlooked.
The all but forgotten time is the communist seizure of power in eastern Europe, and the accompanying effects: rape, torture, murder, deportation, betrayal, courage, denial. The book happens to be set in Estonia, but it could be anywhere between the Baltic and the Black sea.
The protagonists are humble people: solid country peasants, minor officials, school children and pensioners. not movers and shakers. But they get moved and shaken in the maelstrom unleashed by the totalitarian superpowers to east and west.
The other era is the time just after the collapse of communism, when the dictatorship of money took over from the dictatorship of the proletariat. The communist system minced people up and sent them east. Human trafficking, the most beastly excrescence of the era of wild capitalism, took people from the east and sent them west to be minced up there.The parallels between the pimps who brutalise Zara, the child of deportees who ended up in Vladivostok, and the NKVD goons four decades earlier who raped her great aunt and forced her to torture her own niece, are all the starker for being understated.
This is not a book to read last thing at night. It reminds us of things that we would rather forget, that happened while the world looked away. It is the story of millions of people forced to make impossible choices, who had their lives and happiness stolen, and then survived only to find new bullies and cheats taking the place of the old ones.
Ms Oksanen's writing is all the more powerful because she tells her story through the eyes of damaged and self-deceiving people: a batty, paranoid old women and an ill-educated, traumatised girl. The reader is left to fill the in gaps, with KGB documents at the end of the book giving the missing clues.
The book bears comparison with the excellent novels of Marina Lewycka, A Short history of Tractors in Ukrainian and the semi-sequel Two Caravans. Those books brought home to a comfortable western audience the precarious half-lifes of eastern emigrés and migrant workers, just below the surface of the orderly "normal" world of modern Britain.
Purge has been a huge success in Ms Oksanen's native Finland and has won prizes across continental Europe. It deserves an equal success now that it is available for an English-speaking audience. Anyone reading this blog is presumably interested in the region, and anyone interested in the region should read this book.
Link. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/07/essential_reading_sofi_oksanens_purge)
POWER and loss are the themes of Sofi Oksanen's gripping novel, Purge, which brings to life two eras, one all but forgotten, and the other conveniently overlooked.
The all but forgotten time is the communist seizure of power in eastern Europe, and the accompanying effects: rape, torture, murder, deportation, betrayal, courage, denial. The book happens to be set in Estonia, but it could be anywhere between the Baltic and the Black sea.
The protagonists are humble people: solid country peasants, minor officials, school children and pensioners. not movers and shakers. But they get moved and shaken in the maelstrom unleashed by the totalitarian superpowers to east and west.
The other era is the time just after the collapse of communism, when the dictatorship of money took over from the dictatorship of the proletariat. The communist system minced people up and sent them east. Human trafficking, the most beastly excrescence of the era of wild capitalism, took people from the east and sent them west to be minced up there.The parallels between the pimps who brutalise Zara, the child of deportees who ended up in Vladivostok, and the NKVD goons four decades earlier who raped her great aunt and forced her to torture her own niece, are all the starker for being understated.
This is not a book to read last thing at night. It reminds us of things that we would rather forget, that happened while the world looked away. It is the story of millions of people forced to make impossible choices, who had their lives and happiness stolen, and then survived only to find new bullies and cheats taking the place of the old ones.
Ms Oksanen's writing is all the more powerful because she tells her story through the eyes of damaged and self-deceiving people: a batty, paranoid old women and an ill-educated, traumatised girl. The reader is left to fill the in gaps, with KGB documents at the end of the book giving the missing clues.
The book bears comparison with the excellent novels of Marina Lewycka, A Short history of Tractors in Ukrainian and the semi-sequel Two Caravans. Those books brought home to a comfortable western audience the precarious half-lifes of eastern emigrés and migrant workers, just below the surface of the orderly "normal" world of modern Britain.
Purge has been a huge success in Ms Oksanen's native Finland and has won prizes across continental Europe. It deserves an equal success now that it is available for an English-speaking audience. Anyone reading this blog is presumably interested in the region, and anyone interested in the region should read this book.
Link. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/07/essential_reading_sofi_oksanens_purge)