From Baltic Shores

At first glance, a collection of 23 stories taken from six Baltic littorals seems an artificial construct. While the history and languages of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania do overlap in some cases, taken as a group, they are quite diverse. Still their writers return to common themes: nature can't be taken for granted and never is, as in Finnish writer Rosa Liksom's story in which a spell of mild summer weather ``brought a more suspicious expression to people's faces than before. The children stayed in the back room on the sofa, and the young men glanced anxiously by turns at their parents and grandparents, expecting an answer which was not to be found.'' There is also a great tenderness for home and family, exemplified in Estonian Einar Maasik's hero's recollections of his spouse: ``[H]e already has a wife and a daughter and... a sweetheart, all in one person, all in that one dumpy, round, ever-balanced thick-spectacled Oie.'' Whatever is lacking in romance, the writers here make up for it in mythopoeia, like in Latvian writer Martins Zelmenis's story of a young boy and a fir tree or, most beautifully, in the Dane Svend Age Madsen's narrative of a young man raised alone in a library who creates his own worlds. If some stories, almost like tone poems, are an acquired taste, and others dealing with repression and bureaucracy in former Soviet republics (most amusingly represented by Estonian Arvo Valton) will seem like any other literature from behind the Iron Curtain, they nonetheless provide a taste of the many facets of this underappreciated literary legacy. (Mar.)