Just Finished Reading: Purge by Sofi Oksanen (FP: 2008)

Estonia, 1992. Aliide Truu just wants to survive. That is her only aim and after decades of doing so, through an early peasant life of hard backbreaking work, the German invasion, The Russian invasion and Occupation, the Soviet collapse and the slow death of peasant existence she’s getting pretty good at it. But the only way to survive in that world is to be hard and carry secrets buried so deep that they will never be revealed. Zara is also a survivor and has almost as many secrets. But Zara is also on the run from the Russian mafia who have been using her in the illegal sex trade in Germany. When they meet, deep in the Estonian forest, it seems like an accident at first. But some of Zara’s secrets involve Aliide and it slowly becomes clear that they have more than a casual connection. But both women have forgotten how to trust and cannot bring themselves to share secrets even if it might save both of their lives.

This is rather a strange book and not just because of its Finnish/Estonian origins. It’s told in a series of flashbacks told from multiple viewpoints which hop between the 1990’s and the 1940’s and times in-between. The story advances slowly (actually too slowly I felt at times) and although you learn quite a bit about both women – from memories and from their conversations in Aliide’s kitchen – I never really engaged with their life stories (tragic though they were). Despite the fact that both of them demanded sympathy for what had happened to them I never developed any kind of emotional attachment to either. I suppose in a lot of ways neither of the women were particularly likable, so I had problems caring a great deal about them.

This is not to say that the novel was particularly badly written – it wasn’t. It was certainly visual enough and more than believable enough considering things reported in the press. Also knowing a little of the experience (thankfully at third hand) of Soviet Occupation those passages that related to that rang true. Yet still I failed to engage. I guess from my point of view there was insufficient tension throughout undoubtedly not helped by my lack of caring for either woman. I hesitate to use the word ‘boring’ but I felt that this definitely moved in that direction. I did actually toy, from time to time, with abandoning it but managed to keep the pages turning to the end. Be warned that there’s a substantial amount of violence in this book generally directed at women and that the sex content is quite high too. Considering the context of the sex this is definitely not one for the faint hearted.

Translated from the Finnish/Estonian by Lola Rogers