The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Vanameeste näppaja (Snatcher of Old Men), by Mehis Heinsaar
reviewed by Janika Kronberg

Mehis Heinsaar. Vanameeste näppaja (Snatcher of Old Men). Tuum, Estonia, 2001. 155 pp. No price given.

Mehis Heinsaar attracted attention in Estonia with his earliest short stories, and his first book, Vanameeste näppaja, received the prestigious Betti Alver award. The book consists of sixteen short stories divided into three cycles. The author’s unmistakable skill unites the exotic and local slum romanticism with traditions of world literature. It abounds in biological, spatial, and temporal mutations, mixed with Soviet kolkhoz life and weird characters. There is, for instance, a strange creature called Gerko living in a maize field, maize being a crop cultivated on Moscow’s orders despite utterly unsuitable climatic conditions. Such true-life Soviet absurdities, like the campaign to make the Siberian rivers run in the opposite direction, greatly enrich Heinsaar’s imagination and form the foundation of his work. The writer himself emphasizes the friction between the worlds of the everyday and that of myths: their convergences are surprising and novel, waking the reader from either real or magical sleep. The effect is all the more powerful, since readers cannot immediately understand into which of the two worlds they have been aroused.

Heinsaar notices details but does not heap them; his language is scant and his stories simple and “ordinary,” at least at first sight. They become unusual by absurd twists and turns, which are rendered in a casual, everyday manner, as if fairy tales and witchcraft were natural parts of our lives. Heinsaar’s stories could be described as magic realism: “How Death Came to Mirabel,” for example, could easily be the title of a García Márquez short story. Although Heinsaar often operates in a clearly Estonian key, many of these stories could happen anywhere and have obviously been inspired by world literature. The cat dictating stories is probably related to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s cat, Murri; some reviewers have cited influences in the Old Testament, Bulgakov, and especially surrealism. The last story, “Encounter in Time,” is a depressing hallucinatory piece about a stinking tramp who rapes a girl on a park bench, mistaking her for the love of his youth. This, too, is a metamorphosis, mutation in time, and reference to Lolita. The story even has a moral side to it, although Heinsaar’s work should be relished in the spirit in which it was written—with soaring imagination and inventiveness.