Nora Ikstena (1969–2026)

Nora Ikstena’s novel, Soviet Milk, is a bleak and sometimes brutal account of the Soviet occupation of Latvia (1944-1989) told from two very personal points of view: an unnamed mother and daughter, their stories narrated in alternating parallel threads. In the first, beginning in 1969, the daughter relates events surrounding her birth and upbringing. The central traumatic incident of the daughter’s very early life is her mother’s refusal to provide the newborn with milk from her show more breasts, convinced it is poisoned. Because of this, the daughter develops an aversion to milk and won’t drink the milk provided to students in school. The mother’s narrative, beginning in 1944, is overshadowed by the cruel Russian aggressor that has overrun their small Baltic neighbour and controls every aspect of Latvian life. Her father raises spruce trees for use at Christmas celebrations, and a key event takes place when she is very young: Russian soldiers arrive on their rural property, hack down the trees (Christmas was banned under Soviet rule), ransack the house, and take her father away. He is subsequently exiled to Siberia and dies there. Both women grow up strong and smart. The mother trains as a doctor, excels in her studies, specializes in gynaecology, and takes a research position at a prestigious institution in Leningrad. But her career is derailed when she experiments with a technique for impregnating women that falls outside approved Soviet methodologies, and she is exiled to a rural outpost and condemned to treating an endless procession of female patients in an ambulatory clinic. The daughter grows up splitting her time between her mother’s isolated rural home and her grandparent’s apartment in Riga. She also excels in her studies but is resentful of the Soviet-dictated curriculum, and yet is cunning and ambitious enough to preserve her future by cloaking defiance under a veneer of conformity. The latter sections of the novel are haunted by the mother’s deepening despair and self-destructive tendencies. One of her patients—the incongruously named Jesse—becomes a close friend and eventually a caregiver when the mother’s mental and physical health go into decline. The writing is rich with symbolic meanings and allegorical flourishes—ie, milk, normally a source of nourishment, but which has been contaminated by Soviet hegemony, and which the daughter refuses to drink. Paradoxically, this novel of lives stifled and hopes thwarted is strangely uplifting: Mother Latvia may buckle under the Soviet boot, but the daughter survives to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc, and new independence for her country. The translation by Margita Gailitis beautifully conveys Nora Ikstena’s message of hope along with the torment and pervasive fear under which the Latvian people lived for more than 40 years. Soviet Milk is also a stern reminder that the freedoms we currently enjoy are hard won and should never be taken for granted. show less

A book club pick!

This was emotionally harrowing, but I am glad that I have read it.

Grandmother, mother, daughter – they are three generations living through the Soviet oppression of Latvia. There are tragedies, broken lives, and for some there is a struggle to build a life despite everything.

The book is written in alternating voices of mother and daughter, creating a haunting duet. Everything feels surreal, with so many things left unsaid. Reading was like finding your way in a suffocating show more fog. The hypocrisy of being a good Soviet citizen is suffocating, yes: “Soviet absurdity of parallel lives.” People grow unmoored, unhinged.

A different pen might have written a story about a mental illness. Nora Ikstena chose to make an overarching metaphor out of it. I respect this choice. Overall, the book is heavy on metaphor of the “hitting a reader hard on the head” variety. That poor hamster! And Jesse’s duality (what a great character it was) was there for a reason. I am usually not fond of such things, but here, they were fitting and right. They were all part of a claustrophobic whole.

Definitely recommendable.

”It was a tranquil November, the kind that stirs an ache for the past.” show less

I loved the way it was written, how neither of the main characters had names and how the pov shifted between them. It is so clear that the characters stand for so much more than just themselves. It's so poetically written, and even though it spans so many years none of the pacing feels off.

A Latvian grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter navigate life in the Soviet Union, focusing on 1969-1989. A father is exiled to Siberia, a doctor loses her prestigious Leningrad post and is assigned to a rural Latvian women's clinic, a girl's rural school always starts late so the students can cut beet and carrot tops.

While this novel is about lives under the Soviet regime--interrogations, accusations, choices being determined for you--it is also about family. Both blood family and show more created family. show less