This is the first book I've read that I couldn't get a grip on at all, no matter the many attempts. Seriously, I just couldn't even move from paragraph to paragraph. I couldn't figure out the structure of the book, it all seemed so random and confusing to me. I really wanted to learn something, but it was as if the matter was closed to me. Not sure if the problem is with the book or with me, trying to understand that book I never felt so incapable of something in my life, weird. ( )

Elegy for the Baltic Germans or Baltischdeutschedämmerung*
Review of the Picador UK hardcover edition (July 22, 2021)

[Rating 4.5 (some points off for errata, see below) from a Balto-Finnic point of view as there was plenty here that I had never known before, may be a 3 to 4 for other readers]
See photo at https://cdn.panos.co.uk/cache/mcache2/00222582.jpg
View of the Narva River on the border between Estonia and Russia viewed from the North. Ivangorod Castle (Russia) can see seen on the left and Hermann Castle (Estonia) can be viewed on the right. Photograph by Carlos Spottorno for Panos UK. Image sourced from Panos.Co.UK.

The Glass Wall is a curious mix of travelogue, memoir, historical anecdotes and the plot summaries of various fictional works. Writer Max Egremont travels to various cities in Estonia and Latvia and meets up with local friends & guides who take him primarily to visit various historic manor houses or their ruins from the times of the Baltic-German landowners who became dominant in Livonia since the Baltic Crusades of the 13th Century through to Tsarist times until Estonian & Latvian Independence in 1918. Lithuania, although a Baltic country, is not visited and is hardly mentioned, as it was more under Polish influence & domination during those times.

The structure of the book doesn't follow any geographical route or pattern that I could understand. Each chapter is usually based out of one city, town or manor. So the chapter themes jump from (in a simplified list) 1. Riga, 2. Narva, 3. Palmse, 4. Cēsis, 5. Narva, 6. Tallinn, 7. Orellen, 8. Rundāle, 9. Riga, 10. Jaunmoku / Liepāja, 11. Daugavpils [mostly about the Latvian heritage of the painter Mark Rothko], 12. Rēzekne, 13. Tallinn / Kolga, 14. Gut Blumbergshof (now Lobērģi), 15. [not centred on a town, mostly about German Army commanders], 16. Regen, Fortress Weißenstein in Bavaria [Vegesack family related], 17. [mostly about the Baltic years of Otto von Kursell & Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter], 18. Stāmeriena [home of Licy von Wolff, later wife of Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 19. Warthegau [the area of Poland expropriated by the Nazis for returning Baltic Germans], 20. Riga [about Jewish resistance to the Nazis), 21. [mostly about Siegfried von Vegesack] 22. Lestene, 23. [about the early Latvian & Estonian Presidents Ulmanis and Päts], 24. Lake Peipsi [about the Old Believers], 25. Saaremaa / Hiiumaa. Each chapter then usually focuses on a local historical personage, family, building of interest as in some of the examples i've detailed above.

When local site and historical anecdotes have been exhausted, Egremont turns regularly to various International, Baltic-German, Estonian and (hardly any) Latvian authors to bump up the content by inserting the plot summaries of works such as Georges Simenon's Pietr the Latvian (1931), Anthony Powell's Venusberg (1932) [about a fictional Baltic city], Siegfried von Vegesack's Die baltische Tragödie (The Baltic Tragedy: a trilogy of novels from 1933-1936) and Jaan Kross's Keisri hull (The Tsar's Madman) (1978). While those works may be based on historical characters and events, they are still fiction, so it was odd to read so much about them. It was especially interesting though to learn about the books that I had never read or heard of previously.

Errata (These are mostly Estonian misspellings, someone who knows Latvian should copyedit this book for further possible corrections)
Page xiii "Jaan Kross, who in the 1970s was considered for the Nobel Prize." > incorrect information, as Jaan Kross had published only a few book by the 1970s. It would be more correct to say it was during the 1990's to 2000s, by which time he had published a few dozen books and additionally had several international translations.
Page 14 "Sinnimae or Blue Hills" s/b Sinimäe or Blue Hills
Page 15 "The Sinnimae battles" s/b The Sinimãe battles
Page 53 "Kalew" s/b Kalev
Page 131 "There'd had been previous deaths..." s/b There had been previous deaths...
Page 159 "Alexander is spruce, out on the land or seated in negotiations ..." s/b ? doesn't make sense, perhaps meant to mean "spruced up"?
Page 223 "Ivars Avask" s/b "Ivar Ivask" (an Estonian poet, although perhaps his Latvian wife called him Ivars, the last name is wrong in any case)
Page 230 "such as such as" s/b such as
Page 240 "Kalivipoeg" s/b Kalevipoeg
Page 265 "Okasanen" s/b Oksanen (i.e. the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen).

Other Reviews
Life on the Edge of Europe by Tom Ball, The TImes, July 17, 2021.
A Baltic travelogue unearths a forgotten past by Edward Lucas, The Economist, July 24, 2021.
Icy Edge of Empires by Ian Thomson, Financial Times, July 30, 2021.
Knights and Commissars by Keith Lowe, Literary Review, no date.

Trivia and Links
The cover photograph for the Picador UK edition, although it is in Black & White and printed on a rather ancient looking piece of paper, is actually from a modern day photographic essay project by Carlos Spottorno which has been incorporated into a non-fiction graphic novel La grieta (The Crack) (2016) about the European immigration crisis. You can read more about the project and view some sample pages from the graphic novel at https://spottorno.com/la-grieta

* Baltischdeutschedämmerung = Twilight of the Baltic Germans, after Wagner's opera Götterdämmerung = Twilight of the Gods. ( )