![]() ![]() ![]() An unnamed mother and her daughter are at its center, both first-person narrators there are no chapters, and the story flits between the characters’ perspectives to slowly accrue the atmosphere of family life at the intersection of state and patriarchal oppression. ![]() Soviet Milk unfolds the environment and ethos of life in Soviet Latvia through the dual stories of mother and daughter, interwoven across time from the moment of their births, until the stories meet in the novel’s present. The curiously titled novel is an exploration of the pains of motherhood and depression, and to a lesser extent childhood and life in a nation that’s under the constant pressure of occupation. Its literature rarely appears in English, but recent efforts by publisher Peirene Press’s Home in Exile series, an effort to bring contemporary authors from across Europe (and especially, to the west, the lesser-known nations and languages) into English translation has introduced Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk to the Anglophone world. The former Soviet Republic of Latvia, a small nation with a population less than one-fourth the size of New York City, is almost entirely unknown outside of Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea states. ![]()
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