Purge by Sofi Oksanen

i just finished reading Purge by sofi oksanen. it's pretty great. i only just realized that purge is a terrific name for the story. it's about lives and places riddled with evil compromises. the "chrome boot" on everyone's chest and neck can make a marriage a horrific betrayal, a sibling rivalry practically murderous, can make a child silent. the conclusion, or the proposed one, is physical dissolution. it's all too contaminated.

the fortitude and toughness was in those estonian kitchens as much as it was in the forests with the men and guns. to keep pickling, to do all those chores, to see the world with such suspicious and exacting eyes because that's how you were seen. purge is about a time when leaving the stove on or the cupboard open could be pretty mortal mistakes.

and there's really no reprieve from that drabness. the ending, written in missives from the NKVD, really is the tone of the whole book. the characters feel the NKVD's gaze and adopt it, half humanized by their own terror.

well there's a reprieve: the cooking. the descriptions of the sugar beet concoctions and the loaves brushed with sizzling pig fat and the jars exploding with horseradish and garlic and tomatoes are tantalizing. one terrifyingly tense scene takes place in a thick mist of horseradish, with brutal, terrible men wiping at their burning eyes, doing something like crying. it's the closest thing to a fair fight between good and evil in the book.

I really didn't find Zara interesting, the story's really best in the thick of the commie regime. It's an amazing examination of how magnified and terribly powerful the dynamics of daily life become in a place like that. Town gossipers are intelligence agents, the local rowdy kids are the front lines of ideological oppression, conformist boyfriends are actual life savers.  And in many ways people don't change at all.