Ikstena pulls off a quiet tour de force in that sense: she gives us two alternating, but, to an extent, also interchangeable narrative voices, mostly distinct, often syncopated, yet always organically and inalienably connected, as by an unsevered umbilical cord. The only requirement for the authors invited to contribute was to focus on a particular time frame of Latvian history. This is a novel that was written originally on commission, in order to be part of the collection We. Remarkably, refreshingly, beguilingly, Ikstena sums them up, as she does all of her work, as “a celebration of life”.

They are frequently about physical and mental decline, about the will to live or the drive towards a non-existence that defies death itself. the power of cold logic, with faith in a faithless, hopeless world. The stories also feel their way towards a re-encounter with spirituality and eschatology, the Latvian Church and Christianity, with faith vs. They addressed the questions of historic guilt and responsibility, Germans, Russians and their part in Latvia’s history and pain, the disjunction between a cage and freedom, the complexities of history, of allegiances, and of attachment. The first was Life Stories (2004), a collection of short stories centred on exile, death and war, real and existential displacement, alienation, the ‘home of language’, the relationship between mothers and daughters – and also fathers, absent or present. Soviet Milk is Ikstena’s second book in English. Yet if Nora Ikstena’s writing is any proof, survive it she did, and it may be that the goddess gained much strength and the talent of inner vision in the process. Laima must have had a particularly hard time surviving the Soviet rule of Latvia during the 20th century. To fairy tales, storytelling and to the pursuit of truth.

It was most probably she who lured generations of Latvians, both ancient and modern, to their native forests and fields – to mushrooms, to the hues and textures of trees, and the sounds and voices of the air and the mysteries of man and time. It was most probably she who instilled the Latvian language with its rhythmical lilt, its roguish plosives and stops, the stark, spare melodiousness of its musicality. There is a Latvian goddess of happiness, Laima. “ A soul-baring study of depression, intellectual frustration, motherhood, and life in the Soviet Union.” Grant Rintoul, 1st Reading

Nora ikstena soviet milk