Tônu Õnnepalu | Border State / 2000

borders without borders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tônu Õnnepalu Border State, translated from the Estonian by Madli Puhvel (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000)

 

The narrator of Õnnepalu's excellent short novel Border State claims to live in a world without borders or where borders are meaningless. Born in the so-called border state of Estonia, which shares actual borders with Russia and Latvia and speaks a language similar to that of Finland, the narrator tells the story of his life while in Paris in halting French. "All geography is just a dream, a fantasy," he claims. "In reality, all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other, sweeping over nations, skipping like fleas from continent to continent." But in truth he is deluded, a delusion responsible for his murdering his wealthy male lover.

     For the contrite and philosophic narrator of Border State encounters "borders" almost wherever he goes, and actual blockades in his attempts to blend into and be assimilated into the new European society he encounters. His own past, lived in the dark and bleak cold of the Estonian world, has also imbued him with a sense of deprivation, particularly during the Soviet control and occupation of his country. Although neither narrator or author speak of politics, it is clear that the years of hardship have taken their toll on him and his people; like Péter Nádas's character in his great novel A Book of Memories, the experience of a closed world of secrecy and fear have transformed utterly the people suffering those conditions. While he can only embrace the wealth and beauty of the Paris shops and homes, and he often speaks negatively of his birthplace, there is also a great love and longing for his country. His inability to be express this longing and embrace this love further accentuates his own consciousness of difference and cripples his abilities to openly love anything or anyone. Raised by a "grandmother" who was really his mother's stepmother from Poland, the narrator has grown to adulthood surrounded by old age and imminent death. He and his lover alike speak of his homeland as if it were a strange outpost to which no sane person could want to return, and that rejection translates into a personal one as well. In short, he is himself a border state, a man who both hates and loves his own past, who desires the west but recognizes its often hollow and crass aspects. As he tells his story to Angelo—an imagined stranger, an angel, an other self—he exists in a condition between sanity and madness, innocence and absolute guilt. Just as his credit card runs out, so too does his spiritual "credit," and he has no choice but to return to the desolate and cold world which has made him.

     Õnnepalu's short work is a powerful statement of a condition that many a victim of imposed physical and emotional deprivation must suffer: a self that denies itself all the joys of life, a self so deeply in pain that it can only seek to destroy its own being.

 

San Francisco, 2000