Book Review: The Atumn Ball by Mati Unt
The Autumn Ball:
Scenes of City Life
by Mati Unt
(Periodika, 1985)
I tried to find a book cover photo of The Autumn Ball, but had to settle for the movie poster. I have an amazing harcover English translation copy of this book that I found on Alibris: it's the size and heft of Harold and the Purple Crayon, printed in Tallinn in 1985 and has that shiny paper and typewriter font of Soviet-era books.
Enough about the physical book, it's the narrative that I want to gush about. Having read and reviewed a lot of early Soviet literature this year (The Foundation Pit and The White Guard to name but two), it's quite a thrill to read this late-Soviet work and get my mind spinning around the differences. Of course, if I had read this novel in 1985, not knowing how near we were to the end of the Communist-era, would I have given this book the same read? Interestingly, I think so. Having lived for a few months in this part of the world at that time, you could feel the fraying at the edges of Communism, a sense that some kind of end was in sight, but the form it would take was anyone's guess. But Mati Unt saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps it was his Baltic perspective, poised as he was at the edge of the Soviet empire, that gave him a clear-eyed view. Yes, this narrative is full of dead-of-night encounters with militia and vodka being sold from the back of taxi cabs, but in the tradtion of Tolstoy, Unt kept his eye on the soul of his characters and it was clear the souls were suffering.
In terms of story, drop your western-reader expectations of a plot. This is first and foremost a character-driven novel. Its structure alternates viewpoints between the lives of a poet, an architect, a barber, a doorman (bouncer, actually), a divorced mother and her son who all live in the same district in the city of Tallin, capital of Estonia. There are some tenuous threads which ultimately connect these characters, but truly it is the little details of their thoughts and lives which propel the drama of this book. Oddly, compared to A Happy Marriage, these lives are not nearly as tragic, but they feel much more important. Okay, I'm not making sense at this point .. but frankly, this is just the beginning of my Mati Unt initiation. I have three more books of his to read, the latest of which, Brecht at Night, I'm reviewing for the winter edition The Quarterly Conversation. I promise to refine my thoughts on this novel and get back to you.
In the meantime, here is a passage introducing us to one of my favorite characters in this novel, Theo, the doorman.
"It must be made clear from the very start that in the mornings, Theo didn't think of his doorman's job as his main occupation. Yet he knew he was a doorman. What am I? he asked himself sometimes in the morning, scrutinizing himself in the mirror. Where has the path of life lead me? What social class do I belong to after all? His place in the contemporary social hierarchy was a problem for Theo. True, there was a multi-volume work (L. Thorndike. A History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York, 1923-1958) lying on his table, but next to it were some sausage skins and glasses with traces of liqueur in them; some tarts had recently left the place, there was theosophical literature around, but his member was sore again, and pustules marred his face. Theo considered himself an intellectual and awdebauchee at the same time, or perhaps neither. He rubbed his forehead with some eau de Cologne and inspected himself, asking, What am I?"