I found out about this book from the Estonian guy in my book group. Its author is a 33 year old Finnish-Estonian woman who first conceived of the story as a play. The novel is the first to win both of Finland's top literary awards, the Finlandia and the Runeberg.
Looking at the cover, which features a thin young woman wearing an apron, working at a counter with a lump of dough and some apples and looking behind her, with a slight air of unexplained tension, an American reader might surmise that the title refers in some way to eating disorders. It does not, at all. Instead, it is a reference to the the Soviet persecution of large segments of the Estonian population after World War II. One of the two main characters of the book was a young woman during that bleak period, and the other one, a younger woman, also has a personal relationship to that word.
The action of the novel opens in 1992, when the two characters come together, but this action is interspersed with a written diary of another character from the past, and other written documents, and the narrative bounces between decades, between the 1930's and 40's and 1992. Even translated into English, the language of the novel is obviously literary yet not pretentious. Somehow, the reader does not shrink away, even when terrible events, and perhaps even more terrible non-events, play out.
Before I read Purge, I asked my Estonian friend what rings true to him in terms of his own perceptions of rural Estonia, and he said, well, the flies...the constant swatting of flies.
Like the movie about rural Missouri, Winter's Bone, it has harsh and difficult parts, yet it left me more reflective than dismayed.
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