Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena review – a blistering Latvian bestseller | Books

Nora Ikstena’s ‘Soviet Milk’ - The White Review
▻http://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/nora-ikstenas-soviet-milk

Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember. ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first. ‘I don’t remember 22 October 1944,’ says the second, ‘but I can reconstruct it.’ They can only reconstruct what happened because these are the days on which they were born. Birth reminds us that we are always dependent upon another to know the truth of who we are, something few of us ever come to terms with. These two women are never named: the first, born in Riga in 1969 in the early years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule over the Soviet Union, is the daughter of the second, born when Riga was liberated from the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. This mother is also a daughter, born to a woman who resolved to forget the independent Latvia of her youth, and a father who refused to forget that Latvia condemned him to the gulag. Soviet Milk consists of these two women telling their stories in short alternating sections, manifesting in its form the intimacy and distance of what the daughter calls their ‘two parallel worlds’.