Novel
Felix Ormusson
Not translated into English
Friedebert Tuglas · 1915
Synopsis
Felix Ormusson, a twenty-five-year-old writer, settles for the summer on a farm in southern Estonia and keeps a diary while he tries to write a book. The house belongs to Helene, who is twenty-six, her doctor husband and their little boy; the younger sister, Marion, is eighteen. He first falls in love with the elder, then with the younger, and notes everything down: the heat, the storms, what he believes he reads in a glance. The two women, for their part, do not take an interest in him in the same order.
Context
Nine chapters first appeared in the fourth album of Noor-Eesti, in 1912, under a different title, and the whole volume in Tartu three years later. The book is made up of two parts: a letter addressed to the hero in Paris and signed with the author's initials, then the hero's own diary. The man who wrote it always refused to see it as a novel; he saw it as a joke at his own expense and at that of his time, a parody that a preface should have announced. Readers and the university decided otherwise.
Who it is for
Two hundred and fifty pages in Estonian, never published in French, although several short stories by the same author are. It should be known that nothing happens in it except in the mind of the one holding the pen.
Prizes and reception
One of the books through which the Estonian reader encountered modern prose, and the first of the only two novels by its author.