Mati Unt (1944–2005)

If you leave out enough, then that one word, for instance night in the phrase when night falls, will begin to reverberate. It will correspond exactly to what the reader is imagining, become its equivalent. Because inflation is the death of every economy. Words can drop their retinue and meet one another with the greatest dignity imaginable. And it is quite wrong to think that classics in this instance have forgotten about the reader, quite the opposite—they respect the reader.
—from show more Brecht at Night

Every once in a while you stumble upon text within a novel that utterly describes the experience you’ve had while reading that novel. Such is the case with this quote from Mati Unt’s recently translated novel Brecht at Night. Actually, “novel” is too narrow a term to define this work. Unt dances along the edge of biography and history, using fiction to fill in the gaps and to give the work its form. If while reading this book you are overtaken by the urge to check Wikipedia or search for biographies on Brecht at your local bookstore, don’t. Mingling humor and pathos, Unt’s recreation of Brecht is more vivid, more alive than you’ll find in any of those sources. And, more importantly, surrendering the tenuous thread that divides fact from fiction is what immersing yourself in this work is all about.

(for the remainder of this review see the winter 2009 edition of The Quarterly Conversation http://quarterlyconversation.com/brecht-at-night-by-mati-unt) show less

Having read and reviewed a lot of early Soviet literature this year (The Foundation Pit and The White Guard to name but two), it's quite a thrill to read this late-Soviet work and get my mind spinning around the differences. Of course, if I had read this novel in 1985, not knowing how near we were to the end of the Communist-era, would I have given this book the same read? Interestingly, I think so. Having lived for a few months in this part of the world at that time, you could feel the show more fraying at the edges of Communism, a sense that some kind of end was in sight, but the form it would take was anyone's guess. But Mati Unt saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps it was his Baltic perspective, poised as he was at the edge of the Soviet empire, that gave him a clear-eyed view. Yes, this narrative is full of dead-of-night encounters with militia and vodka being sold from the back of taxi cabs, but in the tradtion of Tolstoy, Unt kept his eye on the soul of his characters and it was clear the souls were suffering.

In terms of story, drop your western-reader expectations of a plot. This is first and foremost a character-driven novel. Its structure alternates viewpoints between the lives of a poet, an architect, a barber, a doorman (bouncer, actually), a divorced mother and her son who all live in the same district in the city of Tallin, capital of Estonia. There are some tenuous threads which ultimately connect these characters, but truly it is the little details of their thoughts and lives which propel the drama of this book. show less

I couldn't get into this, it sounded great