Things in the Night

by Mati Unt

Things in the Night 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. Beginning with the simple but moving words, "My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation," and ending with the passionate, lyrical, and immensely sad, "Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days," this astounding novel, set in Estonia near the end of the millennium, is a hymn to the very best in the human imagination and a eulogy for what humans, at their worst, may destroy.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Mati Unt was an Estonian writer, essayist and theatre director.

Unt's first novel, written at the age of 18 after having finished high school, was Hüvasti, kollane kass (Goodbye, Yellow Cat). This made him famous all over Estonia. He studied literature and journalism at Tartu University in Tartu, Estonia.

After this precocious beginning‚ Unt arranged a wide call in the artistic and intellectual circles of Estonia as a writer of the fiction, plays, and criticism. His books The Moon Like the Outgoing Sun, The Debt (1964), On the Existence of life in space, and The Black Motorcyclist rocketed Unt to the top of the novelist world in Estonia. In addition, he served a purpose in bringing avantgarde theatre to post-Soviet Union Estonia. Unt was well known as a theatre director. In 1981, he became a director of the Youth Theatre in Tallinn.

In 1979, his novel Autumn Ball (adapted to a movie in 2007 by Veiko Õunpuu) brought him international recognition. Other books include 1990s Notebook of a Donor and the 2001 play Graal!. Films based on Unt's works Tühirand and Sügisball have been created after his death.

Mati Unt died in 2005. He is buried in the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn.

Reviews

[Hava Kuks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enne Sõela: "See on liig rabelev-raske teos mulle. Segadust ja ahastust kui palju. Ei seo."
Peale Sõela: "Krutskilised killud. Haugata, mäluda, seedida hoolikalt. Küsimus: Kas leppida meie inimliku olemisega siin või rabeleda välja, hakata radikaalseks?"

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel let me down. It began with a whoosh of interest—a postmodern cocktail of writing angst, electricity and Estonian political schism. Then, somewhere around p150, reading another rambling monologue in the one voice Unt can write, I began to itch my bum. Think about my bills. Want a drink. Go for a walk. Picture Lisa Marr in her bikini.

This novel IS great. What it needs is someone to kill the last one hundred pages. So if we imagine those pages don’t exist, this is a poetic, melancholy and affecting little book, rich in beautiful descriptions of Estonian nature, mini-tales of Soviet oppression and amusing poetic interludes. It has a bouncy and free structure. It’s playful. I love these things. The design is beautiful.

But then. Those extra one hundred pages. More rambling first-person speeches. No real sense of what is going on. An anti-structure. The narrator addressing us as an absent second-person wife, who never turns up. Irritating use of exclamation marks. More Latin phrases for cacti. Oh God! Is that the time? I’m afraid I have some business to attend to, Mr. Unt. Goodbye.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a joint review of Mati Unt's Things in the Night and Zoran Zivkovic's Hidden Camera, go to:

http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the books I've ever bought where I have no idea why I bought it, this one may be the biggest mystery to me.

It’s a translation of an Estonian novel, published in the US in 2006 after the author's death the year before. The author, Mati Unt, was well known in his country but doesn't seem like a household name to the rest of the world, with all the translations of his novel into English seemingly coming after this was brought over. He's not any kind of international award winner that might have caught my attention and this particular book was an online purchase, suggesting that I deliberately sought it out instead of just randomly grabbing a book that looked interesting off the bookshelf of the local giant chain bookstore, which tended to be my typical M.O. back then. My assumption is that I read about it somewhere and thought it sounded like the book for me, but who knows?

So the why of it may be lost to my personal history but fortunately I didn't saddle myself with a thousand page paean to tedium . . . not only in this relatively short (barely three hundred pages) but Unt's translated style is not hard to read at all, mostly consisting of short to normal length sentences and using words that don't require an advanced degree in literature or a fellowship at the Oxford Dictionary Organization to follow along.

However, don't let the somewhat accessible prose throw you off into thinking that this is what passes for beach reads in Estonia (who, for the record, seem to have fairly nice beaches) or if it is then the reading public of Estonia definitely like to challenge themselves while watching the sunset or watching people play beach volleyball or high-fiving dolphins. Because this is definitely a post-modern work and and Unt has structured it like one of those Escher drawings where the monks are going up the down staircase, only the staircase is collapsing and its unclear which way its supposed to be failing.

What's it about? Darned if I know. A certain period, maybe, or a transition or just his attempt to capture a specific mood that refuses to be defined. This is one of those cases where knowing when a book was written might help to figure out where the author might be coming from. Originally published in 1990, it was written during a period where Estonia was attempting to assert independence from the Soviet Union, which had been running things since WWII, something that Estonians never seem quite pleased with. Finally they were able to kick off the "Singing Revolution" in 1988, with the resulting series of protests and moves by the Estonian government finally culminating in a declaration of independence in 1991 that succeeded despite Soviet tanks rolling in left and right. Miraculously they were able to pull this off without things breaking out into armed conflict. Even so, the Russian army didn't fully leave until 1994 but by then Estonia had been recognized as an independent country and admitted into the United Nations.

While it all turned out well for the Estonians, I can't imagine those years weren't just a little bit tense and without explicitly referencing those years it seems that Unt is trying to capture that particular feeling, like seeing a photograph at a party from years before and trying to bring everything that went on outside the frame back to life. To do so, he makes everything slippery. The novel opens with Unt (or an author) talking about a novel he wants to write about electricity, which will feature another character who is going to blow up a power station. So early on we get snippets of that novel, until that novel starts to become the novel itself and the character of that novel becomes our narrator . . . and that's before we're presented with fragments of journal entries, further musings about electricity, long discussions involving other characters that then seem to vaporize from the narrative.

It all feels like an exercise in controlled collapse, like the slow motion demolition of a building set to classical music (or perhaps more appropriately, "Decasia"). Unlike that other exercise in meta-narratives smashing into each other like bumper cars gone wild, Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds", its doesn't feel like a madcap exploration into the nature of fiction so much as the product of the environment itself . . . like pottery being thrust into a kiln without any kind of temperature control, at some point you lose control over how the end result is going to turn out. The novel is the way it is, perhaps, because given everything going on there's no other way it could have any different.

What this means is that anyone looking for anything resembling a conventional narrative is going to be out of luck. The book at times feels like endless digressions that are just about to start going into the book proper and then veer away at the last second. Sometimes it seizes upon a thread for a chapter or two, like references to a woman he was with and an apartment of cacti, or a long series of conversations with his friend Tissen, who has his own ideas about stuff (and later leads to a visit from a policeman, perhaps the biggest hint of a certain time and place) but if you're waiting for that power station to finally explode, at times it feels like that math exercise where you can "prove" a bullet will never hit someone by continually saying that every second it will go half the distance of the previous second. You're always close and forever arriving but never quite there.

For me, I found this whole approach strangely compelling. There are times when you want to have a straightforward plot gifted to you and there are times when you're just seeking a certain mood. And this book has mood in spades. The translator should probably win an award how effective he's able to convey what Unt's sentences are trying to do, which is constantly describe around something before piercing to the heart of it without telling you what he's seeing. There's a constant sense of exhausted dread coursing through the novel no matter what layer you're on, where everyone is trying to remain aloof from something without at all admitting how much its affecting them. Whether it’s the narrator's discussions of people who spontaneously combusted, or the sometimes intense interrogations about a world that the characters feel can't exist the way it is, Unt conjures this sense that something, somewhere has gone awry and everyone is dealing with the consequences without being able to admit the cause. It hovers in the background as a cloud, a sickness that seems to be its own destiny, tilted enough that you can catch glimpses of the vague fear that the world is stuck this way and won't be able to go back to being "normal" because the term no longer has any relative meaning. What they feel now, in that moment, is normal and if it continues, or changes again, that's normal too.

I don't know how I would have felt about this book reading it years ago when I first bought it but reading it now as we're all groping for a memory of what normal used to be like, forcing ourselves to get used to how life is now while telling ourselves that it won't always be this way, there's an uneasiness and an uncertainty to it that I recognize now, though sometimes I wish I didn't. Reading this book you get a sense of people reacting to the ground shifting them by constantly adjusting their balances, trying to find a sense of comfort while unable to shake the notion that their view of the sky keeps changing, finding some solace in the notion that if they can still see the sky, even skewed or through a sickly filter then it might be cause for, if not optimism then whatever its cousin might be, telling yourself that not feeling well is at least a sign that you can still feel, and acknowledging that existing in a space where trends toward better or worse don't matter as much as the impossible fact of being there in the moment itself is its own form of survival, regardless of the era you inhabit.

[KristenR · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange, disjointed book. Parts of it were very beautifully written, but it was hard to follow and there wasn't really a plot.

I'd probably actually rate this 2.5 stars, but rounded up since, even though it was odd, it was interesting.

[Marie Unt]

haige raamat + sulailm lõid jalad alt, voodist välja enam ei taha tulla. seda raamatut pean iga erineva ilmaga üha uuesti ja uuesti proovima. sulaga: 10/10. järgmine kord võiks suvel vihmaga.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not going to like, this book really confused me. It is disjointed and jumps from one thread to another and back again and even with the chapter titles helping me out, I still found myself somewhat lost by the end. It starts out simply enough with the telling of an activist (I think they're an activist anyway) that sets out to blow up a power station, then this switches to the view of the author writing a book about said activist and their desire to write about electricity. Then there are chapters about life under certain regimes and how things change when these are overthrown, interspersed with other chapters that go back to the original premise of a book within a book. The writing itself was engrossing and at times beautiful to read but the lack of consistent narrative just threw me completely. I think I need to come back to this and read it again as I don't feel that I got every from it.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be remarkable. Full of form play (novel within a novel, theater, poetry, letters), abruptly yet seamlessly switching between first, second, and third person; past and present; historical and fictional. The novel within the novel seeps into the novel itself, just as important Estonian figures seep into fictionalized versions of themselves. Electricity, cacti, urban cannibalism, pigs, holography. Art and anarchy. Postmodernism and modernism. It’s a complex jumble, but it didn’t lose me. The afterword by translator Eric Dickens is required reading especially for those of us with little working knowledge of Estonian history, culture, geography, and politics.

[hella · Rating 5 out of 5]

priima

[John Brookes · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Things in the Night” by Estonian writer Mati Unt, takes place on the cusp of this Estonia's transition from Soviet rule to independence.

What immediately became clear to me upon reading this novel, was that Unt was a writer very much in the postmodernist vein. The first few chapters concern an unknown activist, with unknown motives, making his way towards a small power generator with a view to blowing it up. The narrative takes place in the form of an interview with an unknown interviewer.

However, it is soon made apparent that this section is actually an unfinished novel by a famous Estonian author who then proceeds to form the main narrative of this novel. Thus Unt makes his intentions clear from the start – this is to be no clear cut, plot-driven linear novel – rather it increasingly becomes a post-modern metafiction. To clarify: metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection.

If this sounds a little overly “art-for-art’s sake” and disengaging; well sadly that’s how the novel is in my opinion. And I am not a Luddite in terms of literary convention; I am a big fan of postmodern writers ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Salman Rushdie to Thomas Pynchon. Indeed, one of my favourite books recently has been the highly experimental “Natural Novel” by Georgi Gospodinov of Bulgaria. Despite its unusual structure and non-linear plot; Gospodinov’s novel managed to be both engaging and genuinely interesting in terms of giving an insight into an unfamiliar culture and society.

Sadly “Things in the Night” is neither engaging nor enlightening. The fact that this review so far has dealt (necessarily) with form and structure rather than any content is telling. I would have liked to come away from this novel with a greater sense of content, of the experience of Estonian people, and of how the crucial events of Estonian independence in the early 1990s actually played out.

That said, there ARE some worthwhile nuggets to be found in this work, and it would be churlish to suggest that there is no definable plot here at all. So I also include an attempt at a straight plot review here also:

“Things in the Night” begins with a Prologue, the first sentence reaching out: "My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation." The explanation is, mainly, for a novel-project the narrator has long planned - "a book on electricity", he explains, one of his long-time ambitions. Appropriately enough, the next chapter is: The First Chapter of the Novel - but that doesn't get too far: first reality intrudes, and then the whole project peters out, the writer hitting a dead-end very early on.

The planned novel was one of protest and about taking action: the central character wants to blow up a power plant. It's less about changing the world - the act is a gesture, and one of futility at that - than a demonstration of the character's dissatisfaction. As is, he can't even go through with it. But “Things in the Night” continues in this vein of protest, a lashing out in all directions, with no specific targets.

As I have mentioned, this book was written in a then still Soviet Estonia, and in the book life there is explored using a variety of approaches. At one point the narrator explains why he doesn't just describe the situation as it is:

“Because at an everyday level, life in this country is simply appalling, and if you start trying to describe the horror of it, you really have to devote yourself to the task, stack up thousands of pages of all kinds of absurdities [...] but I don't want to write about it all, and nobody would want to read it anyway. One should rather push this frustration down into the subconscious and write as Proust suggested: one of the characters doesn't close a window, doesn't wash his hands, doesn't put on a coat, doesn't say a word to introduce himself. That is a more honest and pure feeling”.

Personally, I would have preferred the detail!
Still, some of the horrors are described, culminating in a nightmarish scenario of a power outage in sub-zero weather, a blacked-out city frozen solid. This is the nearest the novel comes to a plot (coming in the second third of the book) and contains some genuinely eerie descriptions of the abandoned winter nightlandscape of the city that the writer ventures out into.

As I say – there is no clear linear narrative, although the story does progress - albeit fitfully and with a variety of digressions. There's a significant woman in his life (never elaborated upon): Susie; and an antagonist of sorts, Tissen. There is also a large collection of Cacti that the narrator keeps in his high rise apartment flat and whom he engages with to a much greater degree than any of his neighbours, and which he describes at great length.

[gertrud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mõttetu romaan, kõige paremas mõttes

Esiteks pean vajalikuks välja tuua, et teos ei ole mõeldud lugemiseks neile, kes teatud korrapära või kindlapiirilist süžeed tähtsaks peavad. Unt seisab justkui sellele vastu, edastades kerge eneseirooniaga romaani kirjutamise protsessi. Tegemist on kirjutamisprotsessi kirjeldamisega. Puudub otsene ühtsus, kuid see ongi eesmärk. Mis üldse on romaan? Kõiksugused reeglid ning tõekspidamised, mida võib pidada "heaks romaaniks", on pandud kaalukausile. Kui neist ootustest juba lahti saada, läheb lugemine kindlasti hõlpsamalt. Siin räägin pisut elektrist, sest miks ka mitte. Vahel kondan eesmärgitult metsas, lootuses leida seeni, oota! Hea küll, kuradile need seened, siia võiks kirjutada ühe dialoogi, et pisut huvitavam oleks.

Samas on Unt suutnud need näiliselt eraldiseisvad seigad põimida, kujutades kõigis teatavat seisundit, olgu see siis ükskõiksus, igatsus või midagi muud. Emotsioonid ja väljendusrikkus omavad kindlasti suuremat rolli kui loogiline järjestus või sidusus. Ise täielikult teadlik oma kirjutatu absurdsuset, on Unt teoses saavutanud jumala staatuse. Kirjaniku võime manipuleerida nii kirjutatuga kui ka lugejaga on suurepäraselt esile toodud, piire katsudes ning kõigega katsetades. Lõpptulemusena valmib romaan, vist.

Kõige selle juures on midagi äärmiselt eksistentsialistlikku, inimloomusele omast. Sisemonoloogide ja retooriliste küsimuste kaudu, mida on ohtralt, on väljendatud teatavat ebamäärasust ja paratamatust - kõik muu ei oma enam rolli. Puudub igasugune stabiilsus, rutiinile püütakse kogu hingest vastu seista ning ka valusast kriitikast, nii ühiskonna kui ka enda kohta, ei jää puudu. Tegevustel endal puudub "mõte" ning need ei vii näiliselt minategelast kuidagi edasi. Nii surevad tegelase püüdlused juba eos, ideed tulevad ja lähevad. Kaootilisus teebki antud teose niivõrd kauniks.

[Nuki · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Püüad küll nii ja naa seda arutada, aga ikka ei tea, kuhu kaldub või mis on. Mis, kurat, niisuguste asjadega peale hakata? Ma ütlen: mine või hulluks. Ega ma loen küll, kurat, miks ma ei loe. Aga ega nad ei kirjuta ka kõigest, võib-olla ei tea ise ka.“

„Öös on asju“ on justkui romaan romaanis, kuigi pole nagu otseselt mingit romaani. Ei seda „päris“ romaani, ega ka mina tegelase kirjutatut. Tundub nagu oleks Unt hakanud päriselt kirjutama mingit lugu, aga siis omadega jänni jäädes, otsustas kirjutada omadega jänni jäänud kirjanikust. Kohati filosoofiline, kohati unenäoline ja siis jälle poeetiline (õnneks mitte pateetiline), aga alati struktuuritu. Olid peatükid (või lõigud), mis arendasid lugu ja siis järgnesid kohe tüütud monoloogid, millede lugemise ajal kippus mõte lihtsalt uitama. Lõpp läks jällegi huvitavaks. „Öös on asju“ on kahtlemata põnev kirjanduslik eksperiment, milles on kohati mõnusat horror atmosfääri ja absurdihuumorit. Karaktereid on paraku ainult üks, või õigemini, kõik karakterid räägivad Mati Unti häälega – peenutsevad ja targutavad intelligendid. Samas mulle tundub, et see on selline keel põses torge autori enda, kui ka Eesti (pseudo)intelligentsi suunal – vaadake, kui palju ma tean, kui palju ma oskan tsiteerida klassikuid ja erinevates keeltes.

Jabur, aga geniaalne teos, mille puhul on lihtne mõista neid, kellele see romaan ei meeldi ja sama lihtne on mõista neid, kellele see meeldib. Tõenäoliselt pole ühtki teist Eesti ilukirjanduslikku teost, mis oleksid niivõrd informatiivsed kaktuste kohalt.

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A writer after my own heart. We have electricity and some vague disaster, shifty characters, shifty scenes, a shifty narrator, shifty tense, myth and fact intertwining, digressions, cannibals, cacti, and a savoir!... A brilliant, playful, unclassifiable work.

[Laurence Boyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unt's tale is a sprawling and rambling affair that echoes the work of many authors (Calvino, Eco, Joyce) with self-reflexive tendencies and loosely connected series of incidents. The trauma of Estonian occupation - and a preoccupation with popular science and a slight distaste or modern culture - all blend into a book which contains some beautiful and compelling individual moments (and an almost gleeful consistency of digression) but never really coheres as a while. Despite the English version containing an invaluable afterword which contains some crucial background information, those not au fait with Estonian culture, geography and history might find themselves a bit lost and it's ultimately a sometimes fascinating but rather disjointed experience.

[Ragnar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Romaani stuktuuritus, eklektika, absurd, eneseiroonia, targutamine ja seekord isegi kogu teost läbiv meelelaad, ei läinud kuidagi tööle.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listen, my friend, only the individual can have personal sense of responsibility, only the thoughts of an individual can be genuine,if you really are seeking something genuine. Stay on your own as much as you can. The more you can decide for yourself, the more perfect you will become. Because in the case there will be no absolute authority over you, neither friends not public opinion will exist for you, and you will not not have to be friendly in bars. K. says that being alone is an art, which can cost the artist his life. Because the individual is not only passive, just the opposite, he announces his loneliness quite actively.

Psychologists have drawn attention to the act that we turn Others into stereotypes and characters. Others are this or that. For instance weirdos, cunning people, or fanatics. We ourselves are simply Me. We are varied. We suit our partners. We are very open. We are everything. We are different then others, are unique and special.

[lianne]

someone left this at the airport...

... i'm so not interested in this book and i'm 100 pages in... is that a bad sign?

... i've decided to stop with this one. it just sucks. halfway through and no go. ah well, i gave it a shot.

[Ruth Soz · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is no question that the author is talented, but I did not enjoy this at all.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read about a third of this, and I'm abandoning it (for the time being?) It's nimbly written and sometimes funny, but it seems rather aimless and plotless and it's trying my patience.