Estonian autofiction is different from Finnish. There is usually no attempt to disguise it as fiction, but it is a kind of fictional memoir.
Under artist name Mudlum to write Made Luigan (b.1966) blockbuster My Aunt Ellen represents this form of literature quite dogmatically, although dogmatic is not a representative word to describe the rebellious narrative style of Estonian prose.
However, it is not so much about Mudlum’s own life as the influence of his aunt’s and mother’s lives on the narrator’s thinking. At the same time, in the material description, we go through the most drastic phase of change in Estonia, freed from the Soviet Union and occupation, which is also life. Weird stuff stays, new weird stuff comes in.
Water is melted from the snow, the house is heated with coal and old candlesticks are made into new ones, but after a while mood rings, leather vests and endless badminton are ordered from the Select mail-order catalog.
Everything goes aunt, translator-editor Against Nootistawho dated Estonia’s leading Stalinist writer Juhan Smulin with. Smuul was of course married Saarenmaa waltz having written Debora Vaarandin with, but what would not be allowed for a great man of thought.
However, it is not about Smuuli, but about Aunt Ellen, who had a very special personality, a former television and radio personality and the first Estonian language lecturer at the University of Oulu in the 1960s. As a writer, she describes her memories of how it was messy at Aunt Ellen’s place, there were all kinds of things from the floor to the ceiling, from Globus pea cans to silver paper from cigarette packs.
“Someone can easily live in a room with a cultural layer on the floor that reaches halfway up their legs, and be proud and happy when they manage to clean so that there is no more crap up to their ankles,” is how Aunt Ellen’s Merivälja house is described.
Although the sisters are alike in many ways, the aunt succumbed to the chaos and the mother tried to fight against it. “And in that battle, mother’s loss was already clear in advance.”
One memory at a time the focus shifts from Aunt Ellen to the narrator’s mother and at the same time to the narrator himself. Finnish translator living in Estonia Heidi Iivari does not stumble in the transfer of details and moods from one generation to another.
Anecdotes, details, gossip and suspicions overlap in the Estonian way in a satirical narrative, the reading of which is at the same time charmingly detailed entertainment as well as a serious reflection on the changing image of time and transgenerational memories.
“What a person wants most in life is love, but it’s so well hidden and wrapped up in all the nonsense that it’s damn hard to notice,” says the narrator.
“Love was transmitted through apple juice and cutlets and all those strange things that mother had been able to get from the store, cheap breeches and incredibly small woven gloves…”.
The narration is like telling your neighbor about the events of your life over cups of red coffee. The sympathetic touch sticks, it’s easy to leave it for a while, but on the other hand, you want to keep coming back to the world of Ellen, the mother and the narrator, to the island of Muhu or to Tallinn. Coffee is still always bad and that’s why it tastes so fascinating.
In Estonian in contemporary prose, its anarchism is often attractive. The work is not built into a compact package, but can be scattered in many directions.
So too My Aunt Ellenwhich is like the attic of a Muhun Island home, filled with school notebooks written in the calligraphic handwriting of a previous generation, “whose back covers enticed to find and exterminate Colorado beetles.”
The sprawl proves real life, not a TV series. Old houses are full of contradictory memories, and it is precisely from contradictions that reality grows.
The layered connections of Ellen, mother and Mudlum can be found in the basic decorations of life: everything that is sparkling, enchanting and refined is also decayed, forgotten and disappearing at the same time. Everything stays that way for a very long time: things, objects and memories, all of which are emphasized as the narrator always finds something new and old in them.