Author(s): Mati Unt

Novel | Read our reviews! | Dalkey Archive Press

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.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
“We all know that famous people do not have the right to an authentic biography,” states Unt in one of the ironic asides that make up much of this playful account of the time Bertolt Brecht spent in Finland in 1940 awaiting a visa for America, certain he was pursued by ‘What’s-His-Name’. Playful? Yes, as playing with barbed wire can be playful. The asides, largely concerning the Finnish ‘Winter War’ with the USSR and the Soviet subsumption of Unt’s native Estonia, increasingly overwhelm Unt’s affectionately irreverent portrayal of Brecht, his entourage, and the dialectical thinking with which he attempts to grasp the realities that lie between omnipresent contradictions: his socialist ideals and his bourgeois tendencies; nationalism and internationalism; the pulls (on Brecht as on this book) of fact and fiction; and the polarising influences of Stalin and Hitler, whose 1939 non-aggression pact decided the fate of the Baltic states. Brecht is pushed into the background by a new narrator, M. Unt (no relation!), who describes the disintegration of independent Estonia and is in turn silenced and replaced by a series of documents concerning banal yet  chilling details such as lists of deposed officials and their fates, books to be destroyed, and phrase-book extracts from 1940 (“Yesli budesh shumet’, ubyu! – If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you!”); interspersed with poems written by Brecht during this period. The author briefly intrudes, and then Brecht himself reappears from between the dehumanising facts of history like something from Baltic folklore: a creative force, a figure of hope.

{THOMAS}