Brecht at Night (Baltic Literature) [Paperback]

Mati Unt (Author), Eric Dickens (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 14, 2009 | Series: Baltic Literature

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The late Estonian novelist is notable for his irrepressibly playful and idiosyncratic writing style, and Dickens's translation of this slim novel is a perfect example of it. Unt offers a sort of tragic origin myth of Estonia, peopled by Bertolt Brecht and his entourage as they flee from Nazi Germany to Finland in 1940. The author's license with his material is apparent from the very first sentence, which isn't even completed before Unt interrupts it to offer an italicized gloss on the novel's premise. Brecht takes up residence in a hotel in Helsinki, befriending Hella Wuolijoki, an Estonian writer who regales Brecht with her life story, while Unt, in interspersed italicized paragraphs, provides scraps of Estonia's tragic history. Brecht, meanwhile, remains supremely obsessed with himself and chews over his pet subject: dialectics. Dismissing standard conventions of plot and structure, this is a startling document in its own right—of irony, of Unt's experimental style and of the terrible (and mostly unknown to the rest of the world) hardships of Estonia during most of the 20th century. (Sept.)
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Review

"There are people . . . whose role in their domestic culture is nothing less than unique, which makes it difficult to draw any parallels when trying to introduce them. In Estonia, Mati Unt belongs among such people. He is simultaneously a first-class writer, theatre director, critic and columnist, scenographer and ideologue . . . Unt's unique role in Estonia has been that of the 'conveyer of ideas.'" --Mihkel Mutt

"One of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia." --CONTEXT

"Mati Unt was one of Estonia's most influential writers . . . [He] had a splendid detachment and a rampant imagination." --Kate Saunders, The Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr; First English Translation edition (July 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564785327
• ISBN-13: 978-1564785329
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,589,317 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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