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Things in the NightAuthor: Mati Unt Translator: Eric Dickens Eastern European Literature Series January 2006 306 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-388-X Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.16 
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Book Description
Things in the Night explores a world on the edge of disaster—plagued by mysterious power-outages and threatened by ominous conspiracies—juxtaposed against images and stories of unsurpassed beauty and tenderness.
Beginning with the simple but moving words, "My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation," and ending with the passionate, lyrical, and immensely sad, "Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days," this astounding novel, set in Estonia near the end of the millennium, is a hymn to the very best in the human imagination and a eulogy for what humans, at their worst, may destroy.
About the Author
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Mati Unt's novels The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, The Autumn Ball, Things in the Night, and Diary of a Blood Donor, among others, established him as one of the most prolific and well-regarded novelists in Estonia. He was also instrumental in bringing avant-garde theater to post-Soviet Union Estonia and was well known as a director. |
About the Translator
| Eric Dickens is a translator and reviewer of Estonian and Finnish-Swedish literature. He is currently translating work by the novelists Toomas Vint and Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo. |
Praise
"Unt's novel consists of the author's confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations . . . The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people's words, cliches behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while being very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas which drive the novel are primarily a fear of people and misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt's earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism."—Kalev KeskAfterwards, we were again driving through fields, in a strange car, among strangers.
The grain was growing lush, the rain was on its way, the grain at risk as always.
The cemetery was left behind, including all the flesh, blood, skin, and bones.
The grain was bright, swayed, billowed. Yes, just like the sea, only white.
The grain was bright, the sky dark.
The sky is darker than the earth, I’ve known that since I was a child. In winter the sky is darker than the snow. In summer the sky is darker than the grain.
I said to You:
“Look.”
“What?” You asked. “Where?”
“There, there, quick, look.”
You looked but no doubt saw nothing.
I pointed with my finger. You looked.
Then You turned to me.
“It was just as if there were little eyes out there in the rye, little ones, black ones. Am I right?”
“You’re right, my dear.”
The rye ended, now there were potato fields, then came the beets, then potatoes again.
There were trends in those years, ones that did not of course leave me untouched either, though I tried to let them affect me as little as possible. There were various trends and a number of them really did affect me directly. I noticed phenomena around me that were hard to define, but they got mixed in with things I had loved for years. I had, for example, been involved for years with the fate of the world. I now felt a slight nausea when the thought struck me that I was responsible for everything. That kind of metamorphosis was calling forth reality, everyday life that was of course as opaque as always, like a Mayan veil covering everything, myself included. I was walking as if in a thick fog, though the sky was clear. Later on, I read in the papers that the world and mankind had begun to decline and the end was near. Lethargy started to appear everywhere. So we felt we all had something in common. In its own way, it was a pity that we weren’t being honest with one another, weren’t sharing our impressions. On the other hand, it was good that we didn’t understand why we were happy. Now, my dear, I know. We no longer needed to develop or evolve in any way. We were doomed to die and we were no longer linked to life by any kind of responsibility. We could be as free as the pigs who ran in the fields. Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days.