Novel
Emajõgi
Not translated into English
Bernard Kangro · 1961
Synopsis
Tartu, in the second half of the thirties. We meet again the circle of literature students from the previous volume, and a question that preoccupies them all: why did Asse Jairus take her own life, and why did Villi Oona do the same? The novel looks for the answer through several viewpoints at once, moves forward and back in time, and makes the town and its river a place where eras and places blend as in a labyrinth.
Context
The second part of a cycle of six novels devoted to Tartu, the book was published in Lund in 1961 by Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv and takes up the characters of the one that precedes it. While writing it, its author kept an account of that writing, which was only published in 1998. The cycle's reception was at first mixed, then it found its readers in exile as in Estonia, where the novel was reissued in 1991, and again in 2023 with the five other volumes.
Who it is for
Three hundred and twenty pages in Estonian, never translated. One needs to know the characters of the first volume, and to accept a chronology that moves forward and back.
Prizes and reception
With Jäälätted, the best-received novel of the Tartu cycle; a cycle that hastened the emancipation of Estonian prose from the realist canon.