We learn about the mother’s lost father and her own mother’s remarriage. (Personally, I like to try and work out what words mean even in languages I know nothing about.)Īs the two talk about their lives in the last decades of the Soviet Union, we also get hints about the mother’s background. She left some passages of untranslated Latvian and Russian poetry and songs, which I think added to the sense of place. Aside from my occasional confusion, I liked Gailitis’ translation. I’m not sure if the two women are supposed to sound so similar or if that’s because of the translation. There were times when I was confused about who was talking, until something happened that I could assign to one character or the other. The other is her mother, born in 1944 in a small village in the Latvian countryside. One of these voices is a daughter, born in Riga in 1969. We only know which first-person narrator is who because of their relationships to each other. But in Nora Ikstena’s troubling short novel, Soviet Milk(translated by Margita Gailitis), the withholding of one mother’s milk from her child becomes an unsolvable puzzle for that child as well as a metaphor for the stifling false nurturing of the Soviet Union. Mother’s milk has such a powerful reputation for nutrition and nurturing that it’s sometimes used as a byword for something that feeds our souls.
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