The Man Who Spoke Snakish
by Andrus Kivirähk
The last Estonian who talks to snakes watches his world end.
you want to understand cultural erasure through the funniest and strangest novel written about it
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Leemet is the last person in medieval Estonia who speaks Snakish — the ancient language that gives humans power over animals and the forest. Around him, his people are abandoning the old ways for Christianity and village life and the promise of civilization. He refuses. Kivirähk uses this impossible fable to dispatch from inside Estonia's deepest cultural anxiety — the small nation that has spent a thousand years being told its language and traditions are primitive, irrelevant, worth abandoning. Funny, sad, completely original. Estonia's most beloved contemporary novel and its most Estonian one.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Estonia • Eastern Europe
- Voice
- Written by a Estonian author
- Themes
- After Empire
