Brecht at Night (Baltic Literature) - Softcover

Unt, Mati

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564785327 ISBN 13: 9781564785329

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Synopsis

This "documentary novel," the latest of Estonian author Mati Unt's deadpan and playful works to be translated into English, is about a little-known period in the life of the great Bertolt Brecht, when the writer--having fled Nazi Germany-- became stuck in Finland awaiting the visa that would allow him to leave Europe for the United States. As BB, the avowed communist, continues enjoying the bourgeois pleasures of pre-war life with his wife and tubercular mistress, the Soviet Union is not-so-quietly annexing Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; and the gulf between Brecht's preferred lifestyle and his inflammatory polemics grows larger and larger. Both affectionate and irreverent, this portrait of one of the twentieth century's great authors mixes together a variety of comic styles, excerpts from contemporaneous documents, and Unt's trademark digressions, producing a kind of historical novel as interested in interrogating the past as simply recreating it.

About this title

About the Authors

Mati Unt (1944-2005) was an Estonian writer who began his writing career at the age of nineteen, with a "naive novel" entitled Good-bye, Yellow Cat. From this early beginning, Unt established a broad reputation in the artistic and intellectual circles of Estonia as a writer of fiction, plays, and criticism. His novels The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, Murder in a Hotel, The Autumn Ball, and Things in the Night, among others, established Unt as one of the most prolific and well-regarded novelists in Estonia. In addition to his own writing, he was instrumental in bringing avant-garde theater to post-Soviet Estonia, and was well known as a director.

Eric Dickens is a translator and reviewer of Estonian and Finnish-Swedish literature. He is currently translating work by the novelists Toomas Vint and Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo.

Reviews

The late Estonian novelist is notable for his irrepressibly playful and idiosyncratic writing style, and Dickens's translation of this slim novel is a perfect example of it. Unt offers a sort of tragic origin myth of Estonia, peopled by Bertolt Brecht and his entourage as they flee from Nazi Germany to Finland in 1940. The author's license with his material is apparent from the very first sentence, which isn't even completed before Unt interrupts it to offer an italicized gloss on the novel's premise. Brecht takes up residence in a hotel in Helsinki, befriending Hella Wuolijoki, an Estonian writer who regales Brecht with her life story, while Unt, in interspersed italicized paragraphs, provides scraps of Estonia's tragic history. Brecht, meanwhile, remains supremely obsessed with himself and chews over his pet subject: dialectics. Dismissing standard conventions of plot and structure, this is a startling document in its own right—of irony, of Unt's experimental style and of the terrible (and mostly unknown to the rest of the world) hardships of Estonia during most of the 20th century. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564785327
• ISBN 13: 9781564785329
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209