From Baltic Shores - Softcover

Christopher Moseley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1870041259 ISBN 13: 9781870041256

Publisher: Norvik Pr, 1995

A linguistic tour de force--The Guardian. The harsh climate and often harsh economic conditions of the countries that fringe the shores of the Baltic Sea (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) provide a framework for lives of fierce independence and self-reliance; yet the coldness can be softened by the warmth of trust and dissipated by invigorating fantasy. ""Reading these tales after a steady diet of American post-modernists makes you feel as if you are paging your way slowly back into more vital times.""--Harvard Review. ""Elegant....This book is not only a good read, but a valuable contribution to the unity and diversity of the contemporary short story in the world.""--World Literature Today. Most of the authors whose works are featured in this broad selection are quite young and have not had works published in English translation. The comprehensive introduction to the authors places them in the context of their national literature.

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

At first glance, a collection of 23 stories taken from six Baltic littorals seems an artificial construct. While the history and languages of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania do overlap in some cases, taken as a group, they are quite diverse. Still their writers return to common themes: nature can't be taken for granted and never is, as in Finnish writer Rosa Liksom's story in which a spell of mild summer weather ``brought a more suspicious expression to people's faces than before. The children stayed in the back room on the sofa, and the young men glanced anxiously by turns at their parents and grandparents, expecting an answer which was not to be found.'' There is also a great tenderness for home and family, exemplified in Estonian Einar Maasik's hero's recollections of his spouse: ``[H]e already has a wife and a daughter and... a sweetheart, all in one person, all in that one dumpy, round, ever-balanced thick-spectacled Oie.'' Whatever is lacking in romance, the writers here make up for it in mythopoeia, like in Latvian writer Martins Zelmenis's story of a young boy and a fir tree or, most beautifully, in the Dane Svend Age Madsen's narrative of a young man raised alone in a library who creates his own worlds. If some stories, almost like tone poems, are an acquired taste, and others dealing with repression and bureaucracy in former Soviet republics (most amusingly represented by Estonian Arvo Valton) will seem like any other literature from behind the Iron Curtain, they nonetheless provide a taste of the many facets of this underappreciated literary legacy.

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