Bøger i Estonian Literature serien

Exercises is a mixed genre of memoir, confession, journal and letters, written during a short period in the 1990s when the author, Tõnu Õnnepalu, served as the Estonian cultural representative in Paris.In these pages, Õnnepalu submits all his past commitments and feelings to merciless scrutiny. This elegiac piece contains many perceptive insights into cross-cultural resentment, snobbery, and self-deception. And the main topic of his writing is often the very writing itself, as the means of the construction of one's own identity.The narrator is sufficiently intelligent and clear-sighted enough to make his musings and reflections on culture, daily politics, and sexuality irresistibly--even vo­yeu­ristically--readable.

In a parallel or future Estonia, whose language has been outlawed and its native population deported after the invasion by the Russian Tsardom, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol is resurrected, Christ-like, bringing phantasmagoric mayhem to the sleepy town of Viljandi.By the end of the story, four evangelists will have emerged from the novel's ragtag cast of Russian- speaking beatniks, bohemians, booksellers, blaggers, and Beatles- maniacs to write their subversive Gogol Gospels in the local insane asylum, despite efforts to thwart them on the part of the mysterious Murka, heroine of a criminal underworld ballad and agent of the Tsardom's secret police. By turns exuberant, grotesque, erudite, oneiric, hilarious, mystical, psychedelic, and dystopian, Gogol's Disco tells the parable of a small nation, whose gigantic neighbor quite literally consigns its literature to the latrine, only for it to rise from the dead in a literarily spectacular apocalypse in the best traditions of Bulgakov and magic realism.