Purge

This is a difficult book to review: the stories it tells are harrowing, and yet the prose style is so fragmented and elliptical that I often felt quite detached from it, which is not how I felt a reader should react to this book. It melds the political with the personal, and the two victimised women at its heart become metaphors for Estonia herself, raped and brutalised by a masculinised Soviet Union.What I didn't like is the thread of sentimentality which winds through the book, especially in Aliide's story where the rather trite and overly-familiar nature of a sexual triangle contrasts abruptly with the political situation. I found I just didn't believe in her personal story or her actions which undermined my response to the book. The link, too, between Aliide and Zara felt overly manipulative, something which, as a reader, I resented.That said, this is a book worth reading for its politics, both on a national and gender scale. Ultimately I think this is a bold book with a passionate engagement with history, slightly marred by an overly sentimentalised plot. Oksanen should perhaps have faith that her readers can stick with an intelligent, politicised narrative without needing the bait of a romantic triangle. So a book well worth reading despite some niggles - and a writer to watch.

I'm glad I read Purge, not sure if I enjoyed it, but will definitley go back and read it again in a couple of months.In common with many of the reviewers I found this book alternatley gripping, frustrating, tense, boring and most stages inbetween. All the emotions of obsessive love, rivalry, jelousey, betrayal, corrpution, fear and what people will do to survive are played out against the backdrop of Estonia in the build up to the Second World war, thru the occupations of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, onto the Cold War years and finally into the post Gorbachev era. There are parts that have a '1984' feel to them.The timeline does jump around so you must keep track of what year the characters are in.Some quite ordinary scenes feel very drawn out while other very dramatic events are handled with just a couple of bald sentances - I had to go back and re-read them a few times to make sure I that what I thought just happened really had happened. And yes, there are a couple of quite nasty stomach churning scenes but they aren't gratuitous and they do add a lot of emotional punch.For me, the final coda was very effective even it did jar slightly with the way the rest of the book had been written.

Purge tells a tale across many years, from the 1930s to the early 1990s, and is mostly set in a small, remote village in Estonia. Aliide is an old woman who is terrified by the sight of something in her garden. She is extremely paranoid, living amid piles of old newspapers and artefacts, and spending her time almost obsessively preserving and bottling foodstuffs. She's convinced that whatever is in her garden is an evil trick being played on her by the local youths, but eventually convinces herself to investigate. The "something" is the exhausted, damaged body of a young woman apparently from Russia - who is barely alive. Aliide helps her a little, but not very much as she transfers her suspicions to the girl herself. Gradually, slowly reassured by the girl's ability to speak Estonian, her behaviour and reactions, she allows herself to help her come back to strength. She can't help comparing the girl in her mind to her own daughter, who has left the region and lives a materially well-off life in Helsinki, to her mother's incomprehension. (For example, Aliide offers her daughter some home-preserved vegetables, but the girl refuses as she can buy all that kind of thing at the supermarket.)The damaged young woman is called Zara, who has been on a terrifying journey. Zara comes from Vladivostok, where she lived with her beloved grandmother and her emotionally remote mother, who keep all their possessions in suitcases in a cupboard. Zara was happy enough as a young girl, but longed to escape to a "better" (less poor) life. When an old schoolfriend returns for a visit, wearing furs and glamorous make-up, Zara persuades herself to follow in her footsteps, to devastating consequences. She escapes her ordeal and eventually finds her way to Aliide's house, clutching a picture of Aliide and her sister Ingel as young girls.Interspersed with Zara's story is the much longer one of Aliide, who was young in the early 1930s. She and Ingel were happy in those times, but both of them fell in love with the same man, Hans. He had eyes only for Ingel, and the two were married and ran the farm together with Aliide's help. The Germans invaded in the 1940s, and soon afterwards the Russians took over -- and life under Communist rule was awful. Hans, as an Estonian nationalist, has to hide in the forest and eventually the sisters pretend he died in a road accident and create a hidden room out of a larder where he can stay in relative safety, only coming out at night. The Communist officials don't believe that Hans, a well-known figure, is dead, and so they subject both sisters and eventually Ingel's young daughter, to awful abuse in order to find out where he is. The sisters' dramatic solution to their problem, and Aliide's searing guilt and anger over many years, as well as her pragmatic survival skills that lead to her present-day paranoia, as well as explaining her pickle-making obsession, form much of the bulk of the book.Despite the extremely harrowing nature of some of the events described here (descriptions that never cross the boundary into the gratuitous), I found this book absolutely compelling as an account of what it is like to live in a place occupied not by one but by several different regimes, and was drawn into the story of the little family who has to experience it all and somehow cope with impossibly hateful situations. The character of Aliide is very strongly drawn; Zara slightly less so, but she's sympathetic and also admirable in her reactions to the tragedies she has faced. The plot is good, with several twists and punches as we gradually see the complete picture over the timescale of the novel. The author switches between time as well as points of view (usually Aliide's or Zara's) in her short chapters.Purge is a very interesting novel as well as being extremely readable. It started out life as a play, and in its novel form won various awards in Finland and France as well as the 2010 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Reviewers of the book seem to have had a hard time of it working out whether it is a work of literature or a crime novel (!) which I find amusingly puerile and pretentious of them. I recommend reading it and judging it for yourself, I don't think you'll regret it as the novel is certainly deeply sincere and passionately as well as poetically committed to its point of view.I purchased the Kindle edition of this novel.

I read this book hoping to learn something about what had happened during this period of Russian/Estonian history, and left it feeling as though I had learnt nothing, and in fact quite confused! Maybe I needed to know more about it before I read the book, but as it was, I wasn't sure who was on what side and the books last few pages simply confused me further.I was disappointed that the two stories didn't in the end connect very well, and that I never really found out the fate of the younger girl in the story. It seemed to basically be a story about a nasty woman's obsession with her sisters husband and the horrifying experiences of a young naive girl caught up in the sex trafficking trade. I would have liked to have read more about the two women's reaction to each other once they learnt the truth, I would have like to have learnt more about Allide's motives, and I would have liked to have found out what happened to Zara once she left the house. It felt unfinished, and depressing.