Earth and Ashes/Atiq Rahimi/81 pp.

A very short, but very enjoyable read. (I started it at bedtime last night, and finished it during lunch today.) An Afghani village is destroyed by the Soviet army in retaliation for the (apparent) assassination of some of their troops. Dastaguir and his grandson, Yassin, are the only survivors of his clan; they set out to find Yassin's father (Dastaguir's son), to tell him of the tragedy.
Yassin has lost his hearing from the bombing; the way in which Rahimi describes how Yassin views this is especially well-written. ("The bomb was huge. It brought silence. The tanks took away people's voices and left." Then, "What do they do with all the voices? Why did you let them take away your voice? If you hadn't would they have killed you? Grandmother didn't give them her voice and she's dead." And "Grandfather, do I have a voice? [...] So why am I alive?"
The story is told in the second person, so instead of hearing how some man named Dastaguir is dealing with events, the reader is placed into the situation himself - "you" see this, "you" hear that, "you" tell people the story of your village being destroyed, and it makes the devastation so much more personal; your grandson is deaf, and you're coming to tell his father (your son) that his wife and mother and entire family are dead. So much of what we hear about what's going on in the Middle East is impersonal, statistics about how many died, what town was taken, what new strategies our troops are using to win over the locals. Even though this book was written (in 2000) about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, it personalizes the events that happened then, and what's happening now.

Purge / Sofi Oksanen / 390 p.

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.