Lo reviewed The Death of the Perfect Sentence by Rein Raud
Most interesting for being Estonian
2 stars
The way the book is written, in really short paragraphs switching perspectives and calling lots of names makes it quite hard to follow. On top of that, the story is lacking drive and only gets a little more interesting towards the last quarter of the book. The boxes with explanations interrupting the text should have been footnotes, or even endnotes. The worst parts are the occasional racist comments and the very sexist viewpoint of the characters. Women in the book are mostly appendages of men, who in a strange masochistic way like it that they do not get to have a say in their own lifes. There even is a paragraph dedicated to normalizing rape in marriages, in one of the few internal monologues of a woman. Still, I could stay interested, because it is set in Tallinn and is a serious attempt at describing the time of the fall …
The way the book is written, in really short paragraphs switching perspectives and calling lots of names makes it quite hard to follow. On top of that, the story is lacking drive and only gets a little more interesting towards the last quarter of the book. The boxes with explanations interrupting the text should have been footnotes, or even endnotes. The worst parts are the occasional racist comments and the very sexist viewpoint of the characters. Women in the book are mostly appendages of men, who in a strange masochistic way like it that they do not get to have a say in their own lifes. There even is a paragraph dedicated to normalizing rape in marriages, in one of the few internal monologues of a woman. Still, I could stay interested, because it is set in Tallinn and is a serious attempt at describing the time of the fall of the Estonian SSR, albeit from the experiences of a sexist man.
