Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "finnish"

Having grown up in a communist country, I am skeptical when it comes to successful novels about communism written by writers that haven’t experienced it firsthand. That’s why even before I checked to see if Sofi Oksanen has grown up in Estonia, where her novel takes place, I suspected she hasn’t. It turns out she is Estonian on her mother’s side, but born in Finland. This is not to say that Oksanen’s novel isn’t good: it is a very well written, suspenseful novel—but written for a Western audience and with a somewhat Western sensibility (in the same way the movie The Lives of Others about East Germany under communism was directed by a young German with training in Hollywood).

Purge moves between two periods: the one when the communists took power in Estonia after WWII, which coincided with the Soviet takeover (1946-the early fifties); and the post-communist years (1991-1992) when Estonia conquered its independence and began its transition toward a free market. The character making the connection between the two eras is an elderly, widowed woman, Aliide, who becomes the accidental host of a Russian young girl in need of help, Zara. The girl is hiding from two men who forced her into prostitution after she left Vladivostok (Russia) to work in West Germany in 1991.

It turns out that Zara didn’t stumble by accident in Aliide’s home: she had her address from her grandmother, a woman of Estonian origin, who, before the girl left for Germany, revealed that she had a sister in Estonia (who is, of course, Aliide). And so, we plunge into Aliide’s past and find out how, after having been tortured and raped by the new communist authorities (a fate her sister, and apparently, her seven-year old niece, i.e., Zara’s mother, have also endured) she is forced to become a collaborator (a common practice in communism). Eventually, she marries a communist (whose surprising past is revealed at the end of the novel in an appendix of “top secret” files). After her sister and her daughter (Zara’s future mother) are sent to Siberia, Aliide and her husband move into the freed house, which also serves (unbeknown to Aliide’s husband) as a hiding place for Aliide’s brother-in-law, with whom she is secretly in love.

Although Zara knows who Aliide is, she is unaware of her (and her own family’s) past; on the other hand, Aliide doesn’t know until the end that Zara is her relative, but knows that they have in common a history of surviving male violence. The ending is surprising and, although cathartic, not very plausible. I won’t give it away, but I’ll say that it involves a gun (there is no way that anyone, especially an old babushka, could have owned a gun during communism). There are some other details that bother me, but very likely, they are only noticeable by people like me: besides the gun, I would mention the rape of a seven-year-old, which to me, and probably to most people who’ve grown up in a communist country, seems like a gratuitous addition meant for Western audiences: throw in a scene with a raped child, and everybody will be disgusted with the evil done by the communists. The communists deserve to be accused of many evil things, but the rape of children was not one of them. Nevertheless, the novel is a great read, its best parts being those that describe Aliide in her kitchen, or those dealing with (her) fear. Fear, that feeling specific to dictatorships, is something Oksanen understands and knows how to convey. A good lesson in history, Purge is a novel definitely worth reading.