The first was Life Stories (2004), a collection of short stories centred on exile, death and war, real and existential displacement, alienation, the ‘home of language’, the relationship between mothers and daughters – and also fathers, absent or present. Soviet Milk is Ikstena’s second book in English. Yet if Nora Ikstena’s writing is any proof, survive it she did, and it may be that the goddess gained much strength and the talent of inner vision in the process. Laima must have had a particularly hard time surviving the Soviet rule of Latvia during the 20th century. To fairy tales, storytelling and to the pursuit of truth. It was most probably she who lured generations of Latvians, both ancient and modern, to their native forests and fields – to mushrooms, to the hues and textures of trees, and the sounds and voices of the air and the mysteries of man and time. It was most probably she who instilled the Latvian language with its rhythmical lilt, its roguish plosives and stops, the stark, spare melodiousness of its musicality. There is a Latvian goddess of happiness, Laima. “ A soul-baring study of depression, intellectual frustration, motherhood, and life in the Soviet Union.” Grant Rintoul, 1st Reading
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