A review by em_ham
The Reconstruction by Rein Raud

2.0

I knew very little about Estonia when I started reading The Reconstruction, but visited the country part-way through and started to get more into it after learning more about Estonian history. However, I then lost my way with this novel a bit. Being more familiar with Estonia might have helped, I expect. Whilst I felt invested in the stories of the narrator, his daughter, and a couple of other characters, there were too many others whose journeys and philosophies I struggled to follow or care about. Taking breaks from reading then made it harder to pick up the threads. Still, I was glad that I persisted to the end. The impossiblity of this father getting a clear, single answer to explain his daughter's life and death - or of anyone getting those answers about anyone else - came across powerfully. The father's experience was less intellectualised than other characters' so easier for me to connect with. I particularly liked two passages, one in which he describes the feeling of leaving a foreign city:

I am leaving, but this city will remain, with its people and its sounds and its rhythms, and the fact that it will be left without me once again makes no real difference to it. The faces of passersby, which just a couple of days earlier belonged to people with whom you shared that large space, now seem to retreat behind a border. That space is still theirs, but it's like you no longer exist in it anymore.

And the other reflecting on longing:

Longing is incapable of accepting the empty space, which the world's onward grind should refill as time passes. Rather, it screams out against any kind of touch - wordless, thoughtless, pointless, simply in unadulterated pain. Longing lies near in graveyards, but it is covered by a rug of silence. The scream isn't gone, but it has flowed out from the heart - beneath the green pines, between the sandy paths.