Sacred and Terrible Air

I just finished rading Kurvitz' "Sacred and Terrible Air" and I just want to give some thoughts on it.

Summary of the important point: Don't read it now. Wait for a better translation.

Four girls on summer vacation go missing without a trace. Three boys who befriended them make it their quest to find out about their fate. Twenty years later, whit the world on the brink of nuclear war, they meet again at a class reunion to finally figure out the mystery.

The book takes place in the same world as Disco Elysium, so people who played the game will be familiar with several concept like the Pale, the Innocents and the political structures of the Isolas. For everyone else, these things are well enough explained in the text itself, the glossary at the end is a bit superfluous - especially since there is no index to make you know about it being there at all. It's an e-book. I don't know about you, but I usually don't just flip through the pages of an e-book like I would do with a regular book.

Even though the translation seems rough (more on that below) the writing style is very good. There presentation several characteristics of Soviet-style sci-fi stories. However, I thin Kurvitz took some of those characteristics to the extreme, especially with the ending.

However, the presentation of the plot is also modern to the extreme. It's told in a non-linear manner with constant leaps back in time - and even forward later in the story. This is very common in modern storytelling and definitely necessary to build up some tension. But... I think it was overdone here. Many of the chapters are very short, the point of view constantly changes. Sometimes rather unimportant scenes are held back for later for not apparent reason. I really think a bit more of consistency and longer scenes would have done the plot good. Often I felt like the author was holding information back from me just to rise the tension and then those facts turned out not to be important at all. There's a long story arch that turns out to be just a red herring for example.

The character presentation is rather good for the most part. The three men on their quest are nicely described, even though we only really learn about Khan's motivation. I wish they would be allowed to shine a bit more, I felt like they were given too little room to act.

The world Kurvitz creates is phantastic. Mysteries and stories are hinted on, political systems are created with just a few words. I would have loved to read more on that - but that is actually what you get from Disco Elysium instead. The game will teach you much more about the world than the book does.

The edition I read was the supposedly "better" translation, allegedly done by a professional translator. If that is true, I assume it was an Estonian native with English as his or her second language. That may work sometimes, but it's not the ideal way to do it.

English is not my first language either, but I read English books on a regular basis (just startet Peake's "Titus Groan" which was never translated into German). Well, I had a really hard time with "Sacred and Terrible Air". Many of the sentences just aren't right. It's very hard to make out who is talking in a dialogue. Sometimes one character referred to in an action when the context makes is clear that another one should actually be referred to. I also felt that there were many parts that were supposed to be humorous, but the joke is missing. That is why I would really recommend not reading this book at this point in time.

Unfortunately, the book is not "more Disco Elysium" as many people expect it to be. DE is probably much closer to Kruvitz' tabletop RPG sessions than it is to the book: Countless different characters, and abundance of facts about a weird world and clever dialogues. You don't get this in Sacred and Terrible air. It's a work on its own, and I felt that it had a vastly different tone.