The Death of the Perfect Sentence

This thoughtful spy novel turned love story is set mainly in Estonia during the dying days of the Soviet Union, but also in Russia, Finland, and Sweden. A group of young pro-independence dissidents devise a scheme for smuggling copies of KGB files out of the country, and their fates become entangled, through family and romantic ties, with security services never far behind them. Multiple viewpoints evoke the curious minutiae of everyday life, offer wry observations on the period through personal experience, and ask universal questions about how interpersonal relationships are affected when caught up in momentous historical changes. This sometimes wistful examination of how the Estonian Republic was reborn speaks also of the courage and complex chemistry of those who pushed against a regime whose then weakness could not have been known.

Born in 1961 in Tallinn, Estonia, Rein Raud is a novelist, journalist, translator and academic with expertise on Japanese literature and philosophy. His novels, The Brother (2008) and The Reconstruction (2012) have been translated into English, and he himself wrote his work on the theory of culture, Meaning in Action (2016), in English. He co-authored Practices of Selfhood (2105) in English along with Zygmaunt Baumann. He has translated Japanese thinkers and Dante's Vita Nuova into Estonian. He teaches universities in Estonia and Finland and has hosted a philosophical talk show on Estonian TV.