Toomas Vint

A novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel.

In the novel "An Unending Landscape," a writer is enlisted as an informer for the government and is tasked with infiltrating a possible group of eco-terrorists. While at a rural retreat operated by these so-called Greens, he begins a novel that is a fictionalized and exaggerated version of his experience and calls it "Informer to the Estonian Republic." Inside the latter novel there is then another writer who is writing "A Novel for the End of the Century." In an Epilogue the first writer's wife returns from a trip abroad and finds her husband's manuscript and starts to read "An Unending Landscape," which thus loops the whole experience back around to the title page and onwards ad infinitum.

Depending on your mood and/or sense of mischief, you may find this either intriguing or completely baffling. Although the premise sounds like it might be full of secret agents and spies and terrorists, the actual characters are rather dull and there is little or no espionage or terrorist action as such. As the book progresses through the different layers of novels the execution becomes more refined though and the final "A Novel for the End of the Century" with the Epilogue is the best part of it. Unfortunately that is only about the final 20% of the book, so you have to slog through 80% of often tedious repetitious events to get there.

I confess that I actually bought this book in 2012 shortly after it was published but abandoned reading it at the time. Since then, I have read several other books by Toomas Vint, the superb English fiction/nonfiction anthology "The Sweepstakes of Love" (2016) and the Estonian originals "Kunstniku elu" (An Artist's Life) (2011) and the short-stories-as-a-novel "Üüriline" (The Tenant) (2009) and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Vint's quirky surreal style is probably an acquired taste though and may not be immediately appealing. The shorter fiction seems the best entry into his world and I would advise trying that out first before you attempt his novels.

Notes
1) The introduction by translator Eric Dickens is excellent and provides an informative briefing on Toomas Vint and several of the major Estonian references that may be unfamiliar to international readers.
2) The copy-editing by Dalkey Press suffers from the too frequent errors syndrome that I have noticed in most English language translations from Estonian. The errors are too numerous to list here.… (mehr)