by Douglas Messerli
Mati Unt Things in
the Night (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006)
The Estonian writer Mati Unt published his fiction Öös on asju in 1990, and Dalkey Archive
has just released an English translation by Eric Dickens of this masterwork, Things in the Night.
Rather than a
novel, the work might be described as a kind of loosely knit fictional journal
covering a certain period of the author/narrator’s life and Estonian history.
The central figure undergoes a series of rather unpleasant and interrelated
events, all connected in some way with his secret hobby, a passion for
electricity. And, indeed, the fiction holds together like a series of positive
and negative ions ready to take on an electric charge. There are approximately
eight “events” that make up the substance of this book.
Unt begins with
sections from an uncompleted novel focused on a young, disaffected Estonian
(not unlike himself) who has decided that instead of committing suicide he will
endeavor to perform an immediate deed that will wake up the world and,
possibly, make it temporarily a better place. Determined to blow up a small
electrical station in Liikola, the character, we perceive, is a comic one, who
recognizing his own ridiculousness, still hopes, as he puts it, to at least go
out “with a bang. Or at least make a fool of myself, such a great fool of
myself, such a fool that people would snicker for a hundred years to come… The
man wanted to blow up machines here in Northern Europe, wanted to become a new
Luddite, a new Herostratus: naïve, but justified in his actions; crazy, but
interesting, banal, but a man of his time….” The figure, however, falls to
sleep instead, and upon awaking, realizes just that the plan alone is perhaps
enough. He throws his rucksack full of weapons into a river and returns home.
So too does the author realize that he has no novel to write. The book is left
halfway finished—although part of it is published in a local newspaper.
The second “event”
is the author’s encounter with a young woman, Susie, who with the narrator
leaves a party and freely gives herself in sex, proclaiming the next morning
that she is determined to have a child with him. The narrator is appalled and
quickly escapes what he sees as the woman’s “assault.”
In a third such
“event,” a woman delivers to the narrator 100 or so cacti, evidently moving in
with them for a period of time. This woman remains quite shadowy throughout the
book, but apparently the narrator has a longer relationship with her; clearly
the cacti remain in his possession.
A fourth “event”
occurs as the hero determines to go mushroom hunting, even though he knows
clearly it is not yet the right time of year. In the forest where he has been
left by a taxi, he becomes impossibly lost, and, more and more disoriented as
he proceeds, he nearly gives up. Suddenly other hikers appear, and ultimately
he finds his way back to Tallinn, recognizing that he is near the home of his
friend, the noted Estonian explorer, documentary author and filmmaker, Lennart
Meri (who, in the real world, would ultimately become the Foreign Minister of
Estonia in the period between the fall of the Soviet Republic and Estonian
freedom in 1990-1991). The pleasant conversation between himself and Meri is
interrupted by the appearance of a gnome-like shaman, an old woman patiently
sitting in a nearby chair. Upon leaving this noted figure’s house, the narrator
hides, witnessing the appearance of two other such old women, dressed in black.
As he waits even longer, another seems to appear—the mystery of which sends him
running off.
On his way home,
his taxi is stopped by the police who have cordoned off a street where, it
appears, they have captured a cannibal who has been the subject of various
stories passing throughout the city for months. The narrator observes the
cannibal as he sits on Yablochkov Street, his hands tied behind his back.
A visit from an
old school friend, Tissen, results in a long series of monologues about
problems facing the world and, in particular, Estonia. Although the narrator
attempts to enter the one-sided conversation, he is quickly shut up, as he is
forced to listen to vague descriptions of Tissen’s scientific project and his threats
of “something big to come.”
On New Year’s
Day, the narrator’s birthday, the city suddenly loses its power and for that
day and the next there is a ghastly silence over the city as a cold storm blows
through. The city remains without heat or light. The narrator leaves his home,
eventually, in the ice-cold air, encountering another being who tells him of
events—including the Communist party’s attempts to solve the crisis. As the
narrator returns home, he encounters a vision of Susie on the stairwell, now a
kind of feminine deity who cuts off his head. He awakens in a hospital, having
suffered erysipelas or “rose-face,” an infection that spreads through the
lymphatic vessels resulting in streaking of the face, fever, chills and pain.
The narrator is
later told that the power failure was due to his friend Tissen’s “Conscience”
machine, which overloaded the transformers and might have caused an outage over
the whole of Europe. Because of his own writings about just such a figure and
his friendship with Tissen, the narrator is suspected of being involved with
Tissen’s acts, but ultimately is found innocent—innocent of knowledge and act.
If these
“events” seem unrelated and fragmentary, they are presented as such. What
connects them is a series of recurring images, themes, and issues that create
within the text a kind of ‘Ring Cycle”-like coherency: images of pigs,
mushrooms, cacti, destructive and disenchanted beings, darkness and light, and
all things connected with electricity from “the body electric” of Whitman to
lightning and other electric discharges, fields of electrical forces, the
“electric” relations between human beings, etc. There is, indeed, a kind of
energy to this book that is not unlike that of the “Ring Cycle,” the Walsung-like
Estonian folk desperately seeking out the “ring” in the form of the power of
electricity, with all of its positive and extremely negative consequences, the
narrator serving as a kind of oafish Siegfried—a hero without a true battle to
fight.
But what most
strikes the reader of this fiction is not so much the events I have outlined
above, but the relationship between those
events, the often comic and yet terrifyingly consequential effects of the
seeming series of plots, not one of which is complete in itself. A novel is begun and left unfinished; a woman
desires a child from a man who believes the world is already overpopulated; a
man is lost and then found; a great world figure is perhaps consorting with
magic; an enemy of the people is captured; a scientist reveals some of his mad
secrets; a dire catastrophe is narrowly averted. Like a series of outlines for
various fictions, Unt’s “events” become fascinating because of their multiple
linkings, the numerous possibilities
of meaning: there is no one solution, no one meaning proffered.
Unlike Wagner’s
great series of operatic events, moreover, Unt’s work ends in a sort of
redemption, as the light plays across the simple beauty of the landscape.
Despite the desire and need of humans to get involved in some way in the
various events of the day—small and large, comic and tragic—there is also a Candide-like
possibility of tending one’s own garden. “We could be as free as pigs who ran
in the fields. Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days.”
In this
fascinating recounting of the dark final years of Estonia’s Communist rule, we
recognize that Unt had an enormous talent for revealing the human side of
history, and it is sad to know that he died this past August at the age of
61.
Los Angeles,
November 28, 2005
(Reprinted
from The American Book Review, vol.
27, no. 4 (May/June 2006)
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