Friday 11 September 2009

Brecht At Night - 2

Eric's translation of Estonian author Mati Unts's Brecht at Night has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times:
Unt's novel becomes a witty portrait of Brecht and a model of how to understand the devastating effects of Stalinism. Unt well knows, as did Brecht, that focusing too much on details of human awfulness becomes debilitating to the story, but if you can only find a way . . . and Unt does. He particularizes the murders, by way of quotation from actual historical documents, fragments, poems -- the narrative is organized like bits and pieces of a documentary -- and by way of his own imagining of how the Communist takeover of Estonia was implemented.
Brecht at Night

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