Things In The Night (Eastern European Literature)

Description:
Set in Estonia near the end of the millennium, a eulogy for what humans may destroy. 'Things In The Night' is a moving and hilarious hybrid work concerning the author's attempts to write a book on electricity in all its forms - a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous mysterious force. Anecdotes and digressions crowd his pages, introducing loquacious cannibals, seductive werewolves, witches in limousines and bomb-toting revolutionaries. This novel is as thrilling and unpredictable as lightning itself. It explores a world on the edge of disaster - plagued by mysterious power-outages and threatened by ominous conspiracies - juxtaposed against images and stories of unsurpassed beauty and tenderness.

Review:
'In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while being very post-modern in its zest for irony. The ideas which drive the novel are primarily a fear of people and misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt's earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.' - Kalev Keskula'

Author Biography:
Mati Unt is an Estonian writer who began his writing career at the age of 19, with a 'naive novel' entitled Goodbye, Yellow Cat. Unt has established a strong reputation in the artistic and intellectual circles of his country as a writer of fiction, plays and criticism. His novels, including The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, Murder in a Hotel and The Autumn Ball, have established him as one of Estonia's most prolific and well-regarded novelists. In addition to his own writing, he has been instrumental in bringing avant-garde theatre to post-Soviet Union Estonia and is well known as a director.