![]() ![]() Even the actions they take which might otherwise seem like forms of asceticism or humility turn out to be motivated by trendiness. Every single villager is status-obsessed and shallow. They want to be forward-thinking, modern, like the Germans. Their actions have exactly one motivation: to be cool. The same is true in spades for the trendy, superstitious Christianity of the village folk. Ulgas the Sage is a pure villain, a charlatan and abuser, and his pagan religion never holds any appeal for Leemet, nor will it appeal to readers. This is largely due to its one-note portrayal of everybody who believes differently from Leemet and his family. There were times when I grew tired and frustrated with Snakish. ![]() That haunting passage with the death of the bull deer is the only place in the novel where we get a portrayal of honored powerlessness and submission. It’s strange that a novel about loss would have no place for honoring suffering. But the human motivations are much less diverse: normalcy and victory, comfort and power. Kivirähk imagines a wild array of weird creatures and events, a kaleidoscope of clashing cultures. It exposes the absurdity of our nostalgia-everybody has his own past, his own preferred marker of decline and form of theatrical revival-while letting readers share Leemet’s conviction that the past he never knew was better than his present life. Snakish captures the paradoxical appeal of the vanishing world and the lost cause. The spine of his story is his quest for the Frog of the North the outcome of that quest adds an autumnal melancholy after several especially brutal and bloody defeats. Snakish is a potent blend of absurd embellishment (the bears who seduce human women, the gigantic trained louse who nuzzles his favorite forest child like an overgrown cat) and utter bereavement. So Leemet’s family are simultaneously skeptics and traditionalists-and they’re outflanked by the arch-traditionalists, the Primates, two fur-covered naked humanoids who claim that only they have preserved a truly ancient way of life. The layers of belatedness pile up: Ulgas the Sage wants to revive pagan rites to pacify the forest sprites, but his bloody plans only harm others without turning up evidence of a single sprite. Leemet’s grandfather had fangs like a snake, but for some reason this trait was not passed on, and his children and grandchildren must make do with boring old human teeth. Leemet grows up hearing tales of the Frog of the North, the great winged snake who once protected the forest people of Estonia from the invading German Christians, but the days of the Frog of the North are long gone. He and his mother and older sister Salme still guard the old ways, along with his Uncle Vootele, Ulgas the Sage and his family, and the local drunk Meeme, but even they are degenerate moderns compared with the men of legend. He is the last boy born in the forest, as opposed to the village, where all the former forest folk have moved. Snakish is a novel about decline and fall, the passing of a way of life-or rather, it’s a novel about several conflicting narratives of decline.įor Leemet is already too late. The mordant fairytale tone will please fans of Angela Carter. #They re turning the frogs gay fullIt’s a wild ride, full of twists and violent incident. Snakish is his crossover novel, winning the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, lending its name to a board game, and, in 2015, becoming the first of his books to be translated into English. ![]() Kivirähk is well-known in his native Estonia. But he is the last, and the world he knew has vanished, leaving him as its lone survivor. He has just used the language of snakes to entice a deer to come to his hand the animals of the forest obey the Snakish language meekly, and Leemet grew up in a world where humans ride wolves and drink their milk. This is the voice of Leemet, the hero of Andrus Kivirähk’s 2007 satirical tragedy The Man Who Spoke Snakish. Is there anything humiliating about submitting yourself to age-old laws and customs? Not in my opinion. No matter that he was coming to be slaughtered. He would have struggled and grappled, tried to get to the treetops, perhaps using his teeth, even as the ancient force of the words drew him to me he would have come to me like a fool, whereas now he came to me like a king. He must have been otherwise he would not have remembered how a deer should behave when called by a human. ![]()
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