Hope in this blistering fable lies not simply in the daughter’s survival but in her relationship with her grandmother, whose optimism and generosity embody the long view of Latvian history. The mother is a tragic figure, an intellectual immersed in samizdat western literature, whose life begins and ends during the Soviet period. “What had he lacked in his cage? Food, a warm lair, a wife and children: had he ruined it all solely because he wanted to run around in my room?” In one blackly comical episode, a pet hamster devours its own young. Ikstena captures an era that seems almost unimaginable now, but which could all too easily returnīut women are the survivors under a regime that punishes strong men who step out of line with transportation and death while driving the weak to annihilate themselves with drink. This rejection of one of the few commodities that flows freely through the land is both a personal anecdote (the daughter’s life is mapped on Ikstena’s own) and a symptom of the psychological damage, the impulse to self-harm, that is caused by the internalisation of political oppression. The mother’s refusal to breastfeed is echoed in her daughter’s later aversion to the milk that all schoolchildren are forced to drink.
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