Book Review: Purge by Sofi Oksanen (Estonia)

Translated by Lola Rogers

Purge is book 8 of my 20 books of summer, written by novelist and playwright Sofi Oksanen (and developed from her own play). Published in 2008, and a bestseller in both Finland and Estonia, it is a book that I’ve had sitting on my Kindle since 2011, so frankly it is a small miracle that I finally got to it! I saw that it was a pick on the BBC World Service’s ‘World Book Club’, which I’m very fond of, and that helped give me the motivation to give it another try, after a brief attempt to get into it in a dentist’s waiting room circa 2014.

Oksanen was born and raised in Finland, but her Estonian mother grew up under the Soviet occupation, which shapes the subject matter of the book. This is a really dark novel, although I had assumed it would be a straightforward ‘murdered woman’ police procedural, and it is much more interesting than that.

The novel comprises short chapters, on multiple timelines, and follows the experiences of two women from different generations, one from Estonia and one from Russia, whose lives intersect. Through key events in their lives, the novel explores the brutal human cost of Estonia’s 20th century history during the Soviet (and briefly Nazi) occupation that lasted until the beginning of the 1990s, and the criminality that emerged during the early years of the transition to capitalism following the collapse of the USSR.

Initially I found the timeline tricky, perhaps because of reading it on Kindle (I kind of hate my Kindle and the whole Kindle experience – give me a real book, with pages), and might have struggled a little more if I hadn’t already known something of Estonia’s history and the rough dates of occupation and independence.

The book opens in 1992, when an ageing, lonely Estonian woman, Aliide, looks out of her window one morning to find a young woman lying on the grass outside, possibly wounded, or even dead. When she brings the girl, Zara, inside, it gradually becomes clear that she is fleeing a violent criminal group trafficking Russian women for sex, with whom she has become embroiled seeking opportunity, not least the money for the newly available, highly covetable Western products.

To Aliide’s consternation, however, it turns out that the two women’ stories are linked, and when Zara reveals a photograph, in Part 2 of the novel we are thrown back in time to the 1940s and Aliide’s story.

During the 1940s Aliide, her sister Ingel and Ingel’s handsome husband Hans lived in the Estonian forestland. Aliide is hopelessly attracted to Hans, and when the Russian occupation comes and anti-communist saboteurs like Hans are rounded up, Aliide and Ingel do everything they can to protect him and Linda, his daughter with Ingel. They even construct a secret room within the house to keep him safe.

Consequently, Aliide and her sister are brutally interrogated and sexually assaulted but they do not reveal Hans’s whereabouts, swearing that he is dead. Nevertheless, Aliide is traumatized and living in constant fear, and she marries horrible communist enforcer Martin (whose sweat stinks of onions and who calls Aliide his ‘little mushroom’). Ultimately she feels she must weigh the lives of those closest to her against her own security.

In exploring the hardships that lead Aliide and Zara to the point at which their lives intersect, the book helps to humanize the impossible decisions people lacking agency were forced to make under (and at the end of) the Soviet regime. This resonates more than ever while Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine, and with reports of the forcible deportation and ‘assimilation’ of Ukrainian children.

The novel has received several prizes, including the Finlandia Prize in 2008 and the Prix Femina in 2010. It’s not my normal sort of read, and its grimness means it’s not an ‘enjoyable’ read, but it was insightful and seamily fascinating.

Book review: A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (Algeria)

Translated by Chris Andrews

This is one of the books that I chose at random off the first shelf at my local library, in the hope of finding a hidden gem, and the seventh of my 20 books of summer 2023 (a popular challenge that is hosted each year by Cathy – except this year I keep reading other books that I don’t feel like reviewing instead of the list I carefully curated!).

A Bookshop in Algiers by Algerian-born writer Kaouther Adimi is about the literary history of Algeria and about a real-life (now defunct) bookshop, Les Vraies Richesses, opened by Edmond Charlot in 1936, which briefly formed a key part of the cultural milieu of Algiers. The short novel follows the fortunes of the shop where Albert Camus launched his first book, through decades of war, revolution and Algeria’s independence from France; the extent of the atrocities carried out by France is not skipped over, and these bits were quite shocking.

The book was nominated for the Prix Goncourt in France, where it was first published in 2017, before appearing in English translation in 2020. It is certainly well-researched: there are three pages of sources listed in a bibliography at the back. However, a significant chunk of the narrative has been directly informed by books of interviews with Charlot, which have been used to inspire large sections comprising lightly fictionalized diary entries. These do not wear their research lightly: I can only describe them as turgid, and they reminded me a bit of a Year 11 history project: I would have been delighted to have seen a bit more embellishment in these sections, to at least wake up the prose a bit.

The diary entries are interspersed with other elements set in the present-day, when a young man, Ryad, with little interest in books, has been commissioned to clear out the contents of the old bookshop. There is less exposition here, and these parts were more enjoyable, if fairly terse.

What is really great though is that a little-known part of Algerian literary history has been able to reach the notice of a wider audience through the publication of this story.

All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art by Patrick Bringley (USA)

This is book number 6 of my 20 books of summer, and it is a really wonderful book, published this year. It is part memoir and part guide to art appreciation, written by Patrick Bringley, who spent a decade working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Bringley had been a successful student, and was on his way to launching the glittering New York journalistic career that seemed his for the taking when his brother became seriously ill with cancer, dying tragically young. Broken after his brother’s early death, Bringley sought a refuge, and space to reflect or just to switch off his thoughts, and he found just that inside the timeless rooms of the Met.

But the book is not primarily a grief memoir. It is interesting in so many ways: Bringley is a warm and erudite guide to the art works themselves, and, even better, the book includes a list of all the many works referenced in the text, while the author’s website includes links to high resolution images of each work, including those that are not included in the Met’s own collection.

As well as expressing the beauty of the art itself, Bringley is an excellent guide to the intrinsic wonder of galleries themselves, and he has an affectionate fascination with the people who go to art galleries, whether they be art fans or not. The book is full of fascinating anecdote, sometimes funny:

“When I stop a middle school kid from climbing into the lap of an ancient Venus one day, he apologizes and looks around thoughtfully. “So all this broken stuff,” he says, surveying a battlefield of headless and noseless and limbless ancient statuary, “did it all break in here?””

The book also gives an insight into the eclectic world of the guards themselves, who until now I have often barely registered when visiting a gallery or museum. But of course they are as full of life and wit as people in any other walk of life, and at the Met hail from all over the world, and every background imaginable, and together inhabit a fascinating sub-culture.

“At the New Yorker my peers had all recently graduated from elite private schools and maybe had worked another job in publishing. At the Met, I know guards who have commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal, driven a taxi, piloted a commercial airliner, framed houses, farmed, taught kindergarten, walked a beat as a cop, reported a beat for a newspaper, and painted facial features on department store mannequins. They are from five continents and five boroughs.”

Book review: Things that Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava (Finnish book of the month)

Translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah

Inspired by Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf, I’ve been borrowing books at random from the first shelf of fiction in Dulwich Library, comprising books between ABU and AHE. I was hoping this might help to liberate me a bit from book reviews and canonical lists (I say ‘a bit’ because I’m still working my way through Peter Boxall’s 1001 books… list, and still reserving and ordering books from the library and Amazon based on mainstream book reviews).

Selja Ahava’s Things that Fall from the Sky, then, was a book I would never have come across in the normal course of events: I had heard neither of her (though she is a well-loved author in Finland), nor of the title. Published in Finnish in 2015, it was published in English in 2019 by OneWorld, longlisted for the 2021 Dublin Literary Award and was the winner of the EU Prize for Literature in 2016.

Given the random, indeed serendipitous, nature of this find, it seemed appropriate that the subject of the book is the arbitrariness of life, and the bizarre acts of fate than can change a life for ever, for good or for bad. Or even simply put an end to it…

The novel, divided into three distinct but linked parts, is based around a family that is affected by indiscriminate, life-changing events. The book has a fablelike feel and weaves in fairy-tale elements. Even the settings are evocative of fairy tales – it opens with a mother, father and daughter living in a chaotic, tumbledown cottage (‘Sawdust House’), while the father’s sister lives in an enormous manor house (‘Extra Great Manor’) with secret passages and 15 bedrooms and sheep roaming the grounds. I was afraid the book would be overfull of whimsy for my tastes, but actually I found these elements really worked, because they are tempered by an underlying seriousness.

In the opening section the mother dies in a terrible freak accident, when a block of ice falls from a passing airplane. Meanwhile, the aunt wins the lottery – twice. And a man in a remote coastal region is arbitrarily struck by lightning time after time.

The narrative unspools clearly and seemingly simply, with a very smooth translation by mother and daughter translation team Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, and I found the book intensely readable.

The novel, though easy to read, is thought-provoking: it’s an ode to the beauty and randomness and tragedy and wonder of life. It also explores the way we like to impose narratives on an existence that is essentially, let’s face it now, out of our control, and it examines the stories we tell ourselves and others to make sense of fate. This appealed to me, as someone who winces when I hear someone say ‘everything happens for a reason’. The prose meanders pleasingly. People move on, or they don’t.

Things that Fall from the Sky was Selja Ahava’s second novel. I would be interested to read her first, published in 2010, and entitled The Day the Whale Swam through London, but it doesn’t seem to have been published in English translation (despite the UK reference in the title!). One can only hope! This was book number 5 of my 20 books of summer 2023.

Book review: I’m not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti (Italy)

Translated by Jonathan Hunt

  • I should add a trigger warning for upsetting content

This is an Italian thriller that is included on the 1001 Books to Read Before you Die list. Published in 2001 in Italian as ‘Io non ho paura’, it appeared in English translation in 2003, when a film adaptation was also released. I requested this copy from my local library, and it is number 4 of my 20 books of summer 23.

The setting is southern Italy in 1978. Michele Amitrano is a nine-year old boy, passing languorous summer days in his rural village in the company of a raggle-taggle bunch of companions: a domineering boy nicknamed ‘Skull’, dumpy 11-year-old Barbara, wealthy Salvatore (who owns multiple Subbuteo sets) and Michele’s five-year-old sister Maria.

Amid the oppressive heat, the adults remain inside as much as possible, while the bored children are left to largely to themselves, and roam the countryside on their bikes. Skull comes up with various sadistic forfeits to keep himself amused, and the more sensitive Michele steps in to save Barbara from a particularly demeaning forfeit. He accepts a hair-raising challenge to investigate a derelict, apparently abandoned farmhouse, but the danger posed by crumbling beams is forgotten when he discovers a young boy, almost hidden and chained in a hole, and it is unclear whether he’s alive or dead.

Michele can hardly believe what he’s seen, and in his shock says nothing to his friends. He tries to raise the issue at home, but his parents are mercurial and he can’t seem to find the right time or the right way to do it, and he tries at first to simply quash his memories. But, at heart, Michele is a sensible kid, and he finds himself compelled to return to the house and work out what he actually saw. As revelations begin to come thick and fast Michele finds his own fate horribly inter-connected with that of the captive boy.

The child’s-eye perspective is expertly rendered, with the horror of loss of innocence adding an extra layer of complexity to the story. The translation is smooth, and the narrative is so taut that I had to keep putting the book down as I couldn’t cope with the tension. I’m not a big reader of thrillers or crime fiction, but this book was a precisely plotted, beautifully written and compelling read.

Book review: Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy (Ireland)

This is book 3 of my 20 books of summer 2023, which runs from 1 June until 1 September (I have read more, but am behind in writing them up!).

This is the first novel I’ve ever read that has captured the sense of having one’s whole identity destroyed and rebuilt that is surely ubiquitous after becoming a mother. Irish novelist Claire Kilroy captures the rawness and heightened emotions of early motherhood, the loneliness of maternity leave, the feral, pure animal protectiveness that kicks in, the annihilating exhaustion and the desperation that comes with a total loss of autonomy. Kilroy smashes every taboo. I would have fallen on this book when I was a mother to a young baby, and even from a distance of over decade since my last I found it hugely resonant.

My first baby cried a lot. I loved her desperately, and love her desperately now too! But I could hard relate to the futile despair of the narrator [known only as Soldier] after closing the door behind her work-bound husband: “Seven thirty-five. Thirteen more hours to go” until the beginning of the blessed bedtime routine.

At home with a baby, slave to that baby’s demands, life shrinks in on itself. Babies do not, as I had imagined, lie mutely and adoringly in a basket at our feet. They rage and pound their fists, and their demands are near-constant, and sleep a rare commodity, likely to be snatched away at any time.

The setting of the book is those almost solely female places that men may never encounter directly: heaving playgrounds, cold coffee in overcrowded mum and baby caffs, music groups in grim dusty halls, the rest of the world “an adult place from which I’d been rejected”.

The book is also a polemic, with the enormous load shouldered by women, both mental and physical, being juxtaposed with Soldier’s interactions with her apparently oblivious husband.

As Doris Lessing wrote: “I haven’t yet met a woman who isn’t bitterly rebellious, wanting children, but resenting them because of the way we are cribbed cabined and confined.”

There’s isn’t a huge amount of plot, but there is a long section where the narrator runs into an old male friend in the playground. Their encounters hum with lost opportunity but also a recognition that they have moved into a new stage of life. When Soldier sees a high-heeled young woman passing the playground she notes with regret that it’s time for that woman to have “her turn on the swing”. Later though, when her friend describes his heightened awareness of the mutability of life and the beauty of the changing seasons since spending so much time with small children, that sense of loss is countered by the recognition that you are a long time dead and there is a need to savour your “turn on the swing” while you have it, and that with parenthood, and even simply in having your life, you have been given just that.

Amid everything, the book is often extremely funny too, and Kilroy has a flamboyant and incisive turn of phrase: describing removing her baby from his buggy to take him into the mother and baby group, she writes: “I unstrapped my prize marrow”, which made me laugh out loud.

I saw a male reviewer mention that the protagonist in this novel goes insane – I would argue she goes no more insane than many other first-time mothers, and that that reviewer’s sense of amused disbelief simply highlights the disconnect between male and female experiences of parenting. The book’s success testifies to the unspoken universality of its theme.

Finally, as an aside, being a fellow Bowie fan I really liked the protagonist’s obvious hero worship of him – with even Sailor, the name used throughout to refer to her infant son, a famous pseudonym of Bowie’s.

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (Finnish book of the month)

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Book 2 of my 20 books of summer, after Megan Abbott’s The Turnout, is this Finnish modern classic by Arto Paasilinna (first published in 1975, and published in English translation in 1995). I’ve accumulated quite a pile of Finnish fiction, which I’m intending to work through at a rate of one a month!

Kaarlo Vatanen lives in Helsinksi, where he works in the world of newspaper reporting, living a desultory life, drinking too much and enduring a failing marriage.

One day the car that he is travelling in with a colleague hits a hare, and he goes off to investigate. Losing patience, the colleague drives off, leaving Vatanen alone in a rural forest area with the injured hare. When his conscience eventually begins to bother him the colleague returns to the scene, but Vatanen is nowhere to be seen.

Vatanen has splinted the hare’s broken hind leg, and made off with it on foot, and what follows is an blackly comic boys’ own rural road trip. It would make a great road movie, and apparently HAS made a great road movie, but I suspect the book might appeal more to a male readership than it did to me. Vatanen flees the metropolitan media world of Helsinki for manual labour, sex with milkmaids, tackling forest fires and hunting bears, while bonding with the many eccentrics he meets along the way. Accompanied by his furry and increasingly loyal friend, he does liberating things like felling pines and setting up bivouacs.

The book was amusing in parts, and contains a visual gag involving a bear that is better than anything in Cocaine Bear (yes, I’ve watched it). The book tackles serious themes with an admirably light touch, and Vatanen’s relationship with the hare is genuinely endearing. None of the female characters would pass the Bechdel test though, and I was never fully engaged in the action. It is not a bad book, as its enduring popularity, modern classic status and translation into many languages attests, but it wasn’t really for me.

Book review: The Turnout by Megan Abbott (USA)

This is book 1 of my 20 books of summer (a challenge organized each year by Cathy), and is one of the books that I chose at random off the first shelf at my local library, in the hope of finding a hidden gem. I have read one of Megan Abbott’s books before though: the earlier Dare Me was an overheated and page-turning book focusing around alpha females and cheer-leading rivalries. It resonated at the time of reading, as I’d inadvertently found myself in a sort of highly charged middle-aged Zumba cult, which meant I looked hotter than I’d looked since my 20s, but, on the downside, was REALLY WEIRD (especially looking back on it now, safely rehabilitated from the over-heated world of ageing mean girls – and quite a lot heavier).

Moving swiftly on. The world of ballet seems to lend itself to feverish plotting (think excellent but bonkers movie Black Swan), and The Turnout is claustrophobic and faintly hysterical from the start. It concerns two adult sisters, Dara and Maria, who have grown up as dancers in a socially isolated, ballet-orientated family, and who have inherited their mother’s dance studio following their parents’ deaths in a car accident.

There are strong Gothic vibes. The girls (“the same but different”) grew up in a large crumbling house, where Dara still lives with her preternaturally beautiful husband Charlie (all cheekbones, blond gracefulness and ancient Greek musculature). Charlie is a former dancer who is battling chronic pain from dancing injuries while working as business manager at the studio, and who spent his formative teenage years living with the two sisters and their parents. The three feel uncomfortably enmeshed, while the prose is cloying and sensuous.

Charlie and the two sisters have kept themselves largely isolated from others, and Dara’s crisp manner with students and parents at the by now very successful studio does not invite intimacy. However, when they hire a contractor to carry out renovation works on their creaking studio his influence begins to dial up the tension, against a background of hormone-driven adolescent rivalries amid preparations for the studio’s annual Nutcracker.

When things come to a head, what had been quite a page-turner lost momentum for me, and I found Abbott’s tendency to tell not show impinged on my enjoyment: it meant I didn’t miss anything, but sometimes I might have preferred the challenge of an intellectual leap. And there were way too many fires.

(Book 1 of my 20 books of summer)

My 20 Books of Summer 2023

Here’s my summer reading list, now I’m all set up to take part again in Cathy’s annual 20 books of summer challenge.

My first three selections were inspired by reading The Shelf, a 2014 book by Phyllis Rose subtitled Adventures in Extreme Reading. I’ve been much-derided for enjoying this book by my children – reading is hardly bass-jumping – but the premise really appeals to me. Rose went to the New York state library, and picked a shelf (almost) at random, pledging to read her way through it. The book was a fascinating exploration of the results of this exercise, and took her away from reading directed by reviews, hype and the canon.

So, off I went to Dulwich Library in South London, and picked up 3 random books off the very first shelf, comprising authors from ABB to ALL.

I know next to nothing about these books, and have previously read only one of the authors (Megan Abbott’s Dare Me).

  • 1, A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi
  • 2, The Turnout by Megan Abbott
  • 3, Things that Fall from the Sky by Selja Ahava

The following five books have effectively been selected in the opposite fashion and by diktat, from books on my TBR that are included on the unofficial canon, the 1001 books to read before you die list. So we have:

  • 4, London Fields by Martin Amis (I read and loved the hilariously repugnant Money)
  • 5, The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna
  • 6, Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev
  • 7, Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  • 8, The Life of Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair
  • 9, I’m Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
  • 10, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Then five hardbacks, mostly recent, to help clear my teetering piles of over-sized books:

  • 11, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
  • 12, French Braid by Anne Tyler
  • 13, All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley
  • 14, A House for Alice by Diana Evans

Then five random books from my TBR:

  • 15, Bolla by Pajtim Statovci
  • 16, The Bitch by Pilar Quintana
  • 17, The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier (for book club)
  • 18, Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas
  • 19, While we were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer (for book club)
  • 20, Purge by Sofi Oksanen (bought on Kindle in 2011!)

Total: roughly 5,643 pages, which means reading 60 pages a day throughout June, July and August and posting every four days(ish), allowing for trips away. No mean feat, as the summer months are gruelling workwise. Eight books here are from the library, one on Kindle (so missing from the pic!) and the remainder are books I’ve bought or been given.

Here’s the stack of books, glowering at the end of the bed (note I’ve edited the selection slightly, mid-challenge):

Book review: Pyre by Perumal Murugan (India)

Translated from Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

First published in 2013, and published in English in 2022, Pyre was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker prize, and selected by my small book club as our most recent choice.

The book can be read as a Gothic love story or folk horror, focusing on an intense but impossible 1980s relationship between a young Indian couple, the beautiful and trusting Saroja, and the naive and utterly captivated Kumaresan. The plot is focused around the intricacies and corrupting injustices of the Indian caste system, and it unfurls with all the tension and sense of inevitability of a South Asian Wicker Man.

Saroja is a fish out of water when she arrives in her new husband’s home village. He is of a different caste, and his family, notably his dreadful, keening mother, are unwilling to accept a girl who is so different from themselves into the fold: her skin is pale, her hands look like they’ve never done a minute’s hard work, and her constitution is far from robust.

Having grown up in the familiar village, Kumaresan is certain that these people he has known all his life will accept his wife once presented with the fact of their inter-caste marriage, but he has under-estimated the resentment and prejudice of the people he thought he understood.

The prose is clean, sharp and to the point, and this is an absorbing and powerful, if bleak, short novel.

Interestingly, the author has spoken of his own experience of being ostracised after the publication of his earlier novel Madhorubhagan in 2010, which was later translated from Tamil by Penguin and published as One Part Woman.

The subject of that book is a poor, childless couple, desperate to become pregnant, and the novel references an ancient Hindu ritual which permitted (according to anecdotal oral history) women struggling to conceive to partner up with unfamiliar men on a single night.

When, following its appearance in English, the book’s content came to the attention of right-wing Hindu and caste-based groups the backlash was intense. Amid violent threats Murugan withdrew the book from sale, and announced his own ‘death’ as a writer on social media: “Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He has no faith in rebirth. As an ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.”

At this point Pyre had already been written (the English translation followed years later). Still, despite the author’s metaphorical death more work is likely to be produced. The International Booker website notes that in 2016 a judge ruled: “Let the author be resurrected to do what he is best at. Write.” Thankfully, Murugan has apparently taken that as an instruction – ‘a command and a benediction’.