Margins
Brecht at Night book cover
Brecht at Night
1997
First Published
3.51
Average Rating
248
Number of Pages
This "documentary novel," the latest of Estonian author Mati Unt's deadpan and playful works to be translated into English, is about a little-known period in the life of the great Bertolt Brecht, when the writer—having fled Nazi Germany—became stuck in Finland awaiting the visa that would allow him to leave Europe for the United States. As BB, the avowed communist, continues enjoying the bourgeois pleasures of pre-war life with his wife and tubercular mistress, the Soviet Union is not-so-quietly annexing Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; and the gulf between Brecht's preferred lifestyle and his inflammatory polemics grows larger and larger. Both affectionate and irreverent, this portrait of one of the twentieth century's great authors mixes together a variety of comic styles, excerpts from contemporaneous documents, and Unt's trademark digressions, producing a kind of historical novel as interested in interrogating the past as simply recreating it.
Avg Rating
3.51
Number of Ratings
53
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
28%
3 STARS
40%
2 STARS
11%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Mati Unt
Mati Unt
Author · 8 books

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.

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