Līga Horgana is back with another literature review, this time Inga Ābele's Paisums translated into English as High Tide by Kaija Straumanis
High Tide by Inga Ābele is a novel about a woman, her
relationships with men, the decisions she has made in the past, the mistakes
she cannot fix and experiences she has gained throughout years. The work has received
high approval by not only getting the Annual Latvian Literary Award but also the
Baltic Assembly Literature Prize. This is not a new book either
in Latvian (the book called “Paisums” in Latvian was published in 2008) or in
English (English translation of Kaija Straumanis got published in USA in 2013,)
but in my case this was the right book to read at the right time. I don’t think
I would have been able to understand the plot and enjoy the form or the novel as
well ten years ago as I can now.
The plot line of High
Tide is pretty simple. The main character Ieva is a young, well-read and
well-educated writer in her early 30s, who has a daughter, supportive parents
and a brother with whom she has a very close relationship; she hasn’t had a
happy marriage life in past, but had a passionate love after it ended. The
novel looks back at the last fifteen or so years of her life. A Biblical motive
runs through the whole work which deals with the question of the sorrow of life
(although this is not Christian literature). It starts with a short chapter detailing
a dream where the woman is talking to God and then in the next chapter mentions
the Garden of Eden and man’s expulsion from there to a much crueler world that
is framed between birth and death and is full of suffering. (Ieva, by the way,
is the Latvian version of Eve – the first woman God created.)
GOD didn’t create
words.
In the beginning
there was a dream.
And at the end
there was again nothing but a dream.
God appeared to a
woman in a dream that was like death.
God found the
woman within this dream and said to her:
“If you agree to
live your life in reverse, you’ll have the power to give life back to your
lover, who died young. Just don’t get your hopes up – your meeting at the
crossroads will last about twenty minutes, no more. Then he’ll continue on
toward old age, but you, back to childhood.”
The woman agreed
immediately.
God said:
“How strange. Do
you really value your own life and experiences so little that you’re willing to
undo all of it without a second thought?”
The woman said
nothing.
She remembered
this dream when she awoke.[1]
Ieva begins as a young seventeen-year-old book-loving
countryside girl who exits her perfectly happy childhood and becomes an adult.
She has her first love, first sexual experiences, wedding, a lot of new
responsibilities including becoming a mother, disappointment in her jealous husband,
a tragic loss of her new boyfriend, and dealing with her own mental struggles.
In addition to the big personal drama that happens as Ieva becomes a self-aware
and independent woman, there is also the chaos, poverty, unemployment, criminal
activity and alcoholism in the post-Soviet 90s. It also shows the depression of
the often-romanticized underground culture with lots of drugs, liquor and
casual sex. The novel talks about the relationship between generations, which
includes love and inevitable discord; it is somewhat framed by the death of old
ones and birth of new ones. It shows that at the end of life there is one
moment when a human has to put down all of their responsibilities, become weak
and helpless as a child again, and let others take care of them. The main message
is that happiness is not a long-term thing. It is found in simple things and lasts
for moments, and one life can contain several happy lives.
Although it is interesting to read about the
love triangle in Ieva’s life, in my opinion the greatest thing about the novel
is its form, which at the same time makes the reading not easy. I could say it
is written in reverse chronology; however, some chapters stand out of it. It is
written from different angles, revealing not only the viewpoint of the main
character but also others who are involved: for example, her husband or
daughter. Chapters are very different – one can be ninety pages long while
another is only a half of a page. One is
an essay full of impressions of life, one is a dialogue, another one includes a
bunch of letters, and then there also can be just classic chronological
narratives and conversations explaining things that have happened. High Tide is like a mosaic that consists
of many different pieces the reader has to collect and put together, and when
the reader finally gets to the end of the book and understands what exactly
happened in Ieva’s life and why, they might want to go back to the beginning
and look through the chapters again to find the details that were quite
mysterious the first time the book was read. I did not read the novel twice,
but I am sure if I had done it I would have found a lot of new things in it.
Another thought I had but I did not try doing myself as well was reading the
book from the last chapter to the beginning. Of course, we are not usually supposed
to read stories from the end, but in this case, I think it might work quite
well.
While I might not have liked all the parts of the
book equally – some dialogues seemed too long and some letters too poetic —
looking at the novel as a whole, I think it is very well planned and very well written.
It is a good choice if the reader is not looking only for some simple
entertaining story to read, because this work asks for a deeper look at the text,
switching from one chapter to another, and a patience to deal with details that
cannot be understood at first.
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