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| Sofi Oksanen in París |
Two ways to write about Estonian history: Ene Mihkelson and Sofi Oksanen
Original language: Estonian
Translated into English by Tiina Randviir
Theme: Estonia
The Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen’s novel Purge (2008) has been very successful internationally. The “novel about life on collective farms in Soviet Estonia” (SO’s own summary), translated into more than twenty languages, tells a captivating tale of the difficult lives of two Estonian women of different generations in the twists and turns of history. The first reason for success is naturally Sofi Oksanen’s talent. Another reason is the fact that the events (in other languages the surroundings probably seem rather exotic) describe general issues in a simple, straightforward manner: violence and women’s fate in the brutal, male-dominated world, whether the sources of violence are state power structures in the 1940s and 1950s or organised crime in the 1990s. In an interview last autumn in Estonia, Sofi Oksanen described how different layers in the book address readers in different countries. People in countries that have recently been under a foreign power understand Purge very well. There is no need to explain in Spain or Poland what censorship is, although it is necessary in the Nordic countries. The eastern parts of Germany still remember the activities of the Stasi and the readers know what persecution and interrogation mean. In western Germany, on the other hand, the readers need convincing that, besides the evil Nazi Germany, there were gulags and communist terror. The crimes committed by the latter can easily be compared to the crimes of the Nazis. And so on and so on (Eesti Päevaleht 23 November 2010). Americans would read the English translation of Purge more like a novel of a family’s or a people’s destiny, as critics have compared Oksanen with Tolstoy and Pasternak. In Britain, on the other hand, the book was categorised as a Nordic crime novel and Oksanen was compared with Stig Larsson, although the critics admitted that Oksanen wrote better than Larsson.
