High Tide by Inga Abele

In the beginning there was a dream.

And at the end there was again nothing but a dream.

God appeared to a woman in a dream that was like death.

God found the woman within this dream and said to her:

"If you agree to live your life in reverse, you'll have the power to give life back to your lover, who died young. Just don't get your hopes up--your meeting at that crossroads will last about twenty minutes, no more. Then he'll continue on toward old age, but you, back toward childhood."

The woman agreed immediately.

High Tide is the story of Ieva, a Latvian woman whose life has been shaped by a single shocking moment: the shooting of her lover Aksels by her husband, Andreijs. Andreijs has been sent to prison for fifteen years, never again to see their daughter, Monta, and Ieva herself has been shattered in a way that makes life difficult and dreamy. But the novel's sections are presented in reverse chronological order, so that the aftermath comes first, and then the act, with two effects: we are shocked (or meant to be) when we discover that Aksels had inoperable bone cancer and months to live, and that Andreijs' shooting was an act of mercy Aksels had wanted Ieva herself to carry out. The second effect, as per that little prefatory bit about God, is that we see the knot of trauma being undone, and Aksels living again.

I'm not sure this schtick entirely works. It's certainly clever, and with a very careful staging, I can imagine the reverse chronology imbuing certain details with a sense of mystery. But the first chapters of the book, I thought, really suffer from a kind of abstraction that comes out of what one can't say, and when something must be said, Abele cheats her way around it: in a long early section about Andreijs life after he gets out of prison, she has him sitting around with his new lover on a couch while he reminisces about his early life with Ieva. This scene, besides feeling like a cheap way of getting around the strictures she's placed on herself, feels extremely inert.

It's no surprise, then, that the best sections come later on, when the context of Ieva's life begins to pile up. I thought the strongest writing in the book was the account of Ieva's newly married life in the early post-Soviet Latvia, as she bounces from job to job looking for a way to support herself and Monta, being either cheated in rapid succession by the capitalists who have rushed to fill in the gaps, or making childish mistakes that get her fired. I thought that had a lot of life, and a sense of humor a lot of the book is missing. I was also really fascinated by the way young Aksels (an extreme pothead and almost entirely unlikable character) turns to the budding punk movement to express himself, and how Ieva is captivated by that, though not a part of it herself.

With the addition of Latvia, my "countries read" list us up to 67!