The reader finishes the prologue and, forewarned, turns to “The First Chapter of the Novel.” It is what our narrator promised—the first chapter of a novel all in dialogue spoken by characters difficult to pin down. A middle-aged Estonian man gets interrogated (by a reporter? a cop? an old friend?) about his plan to destroy the Liikola Power Station. The man’s hope: the beginning of the end of modernity.

Originally published in the author's native Estonia in 1990, this novel has been praised as demonstrating its author's mastery of postmodern literary form, fracturing and recombining werewolf tales and other traditional Estonian tropes into an ironic, multivocal sprawl through subjectivity itself. Using the concept of electricity as its primary source of metaphor and tension, Unt sketches a frozen natural landscape that swells with energy and arcs toward entropy when a power outage threatens the survival of medieval Tallinn. The city avoids natural disaster only through the efforts of the spiritually (and politically) charged Lennart (modeled after real-life Lennart Meri, who would become Estonia's first post-Soviet president two years after this book's initial publication). Given such overt political commentary and the book's timing at the fall of the Soviet Union, readers unfamiliar with Estonian literary tropes or impatient with maximalist prose may be tempted to dismiss this book as a post-Communist period piece. Those willing to make the effort will be rewarded with a brilliant and poignant novel about nature and loss. Brendan Driscoll
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