Novel
Toomas Nipernaadi
August Gailit · 1928
Synopsis
A man arrives in the Estonian countryside in spring under a name no one knows. He is a writer, but he does not say so: he spends the summer roaming the country from village to village, giving himself a new story at each stop. Everywhere a woman listens to him, and he promises her what she is waiting for; then he has to leave before the promise is kept, under the song of the cuckoo and in the bright nights, as autumn draws near.
Context
The volume appeared in Tartu in 1928, from Loodus. Its author came from the sardonic short stories of the Siuru period and from a novel of decline, Purpurne surm, published four years earlier. The book proceeds by episodes held together by a single man and the passing of the seasons. A French translation appeared in Brussels in 1946, an English one from Dedalus in 2018, and Kaljo Kiisk made the film Nipernaadi from it in 1983. A well-known bus in the country, the Katarina Jee, bears the name of a heroine of the novel.
Who it is for
Four hundred and thirty pages in Estonian, translated into French as early as 1946 and into English in 2018. It is worth knowing that the book reads as a series of episodes, each in a different place.
Prizes and reception
His best-known and most influential book: the vagabond Nipernaadi has become a classic figure in Estonia.