Stranger In a Strange Land

A sojourn in the Baltics—discovering much to admire but even more to complain about, with frustration mounting to fury.

By

Andrew Stuttaford

December 15, 2011

Looking for someone to turn lemons into lemonade? In his own distinctive way, Alexander Theroux might be your man. In 2008, Mr. Theroux, an American author (among his works are "Laura Warholic," a novel, and "The Strange Case of Edward Gorey"), moved to Estonia, the northernmost Baltic state, to join his artist-wife, who was then in the former Soviet republic on a "dismally small" Fulbright grant.

It didn't work out. It was never going to. But it appears that Mr. Theroux did not so much succumb to despair as embrace it. In "Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery," he mines his disappointment and catalogs his discontents to impressively crotchety effect. He detested the "unforgiving darkness" of Estonia's long winter; and in a country where conversation can be more elusive, and the company cooler, than the wan November sun, he was infuriated by what he regarded as the locals' "pinched unforthcomingness" and "Völkisch suspicion." He was no more impressed by the natives' often "concave, vaguely worn-out appearance." He does admit to the extraordinary allure of Estonian women (a concession on a par with saying that the Grand Canyon is quite something) but then mars the moment by wondering why such "perfect beauty" should be found in such an unpromising place.

But the flak is not confined to Estonia. Other targets include Israel, Ayn Rand, America's treatment of the Arabs (positively Nazi-like, apparently) and the "dunce" George W. Bush, a "smirking, bowlegged . . . frat-boy" who reduces the usually inventive Mr. Theroux to cliché. Diluting this leftist blah are gibes hurled at secularism, Woody Allen, Oprah Winfrey and a number of the other Fulbright grant-winners (including a "pedantic sod" and "a textbook miser").

The book's subtitle promises a "ramble"—a gentle, bucolic word that gives no hint of the bedlam to come. Mr. Theroux does offer a lightning tour of Estonia's chaotic history and a discursive but weirdly gripping introduction to both the Estonian language and the country's "cuisine." (The scare quotes are Mr. Theroux's: In truth, Estonian food can have a certain Breughelian élan.) For the most part, however, readers are left to wend their way through an often beguiling maze of digression, reminiscence, yakety-yak erudition and occasional unreliability.

ENLARGE

Estonia

By Alexander Theroux (Fantagraphics, 351 pages, $24.99)

It doesn't matter too much that the "techno lezpop duo called t.A.T.u." was Russian, not Estonian, or that the tap water in Estonia is in fact fine, but Mr. Theroux's decision to play down the remarkable progress that this robustly laissez-faire nation has made since breaking from the Kremlin two decades ago is perverse, even if it fits in nicely with his depiction of the country as a Baltic Dogpatch. More strangely still, Mr. Theroux says little about the fraught relations between ethnic Estonians and the large Russian minority that Soviet rule left behind.

The gap left by those under-discussed Russians is filled by a large cast of characters united mainly by their lack of any obvious connection with Estonia and, frequently, distinctly faded fame. Thus, after noting the Estonian language's "primitive cast," Mr. Theroux turns his attention to Lord Monboddo, an 18th-century sage who believed that apes were essentially humans without the power of speech, enjoyably esoteric information that tells us little about Estonia but a lot about Mr. Theroux's magpie mind.

As Mr. Theroux eventually unnecessarily and endearingly explains, his book is as much about him as it is about Estonia. To be fair, amid all the grumbling he finds plenty to admire, not least the lovely medieval jumble of Old Town in Estonia's capital, Tallinn; the music of Arvo Pärt; the Grimm flair of Estonian names (Tarmo, Gerli, Epp); and, with characteristic contrariness, Vana Tallinn, a revolting liqueur of unidentifiable sickliness and bogus antiquity.

But like the country's many invaders—Russians and Germans, and, before them, Swedes and Danes—Mr. Theroux largely uses Estonia as a space for his own purposes, transforming this admirable country into a grotesque but clever caricature perfect for use as a foil. A rain-sodden backwater of "rough-hewn awfulness"—complete with "a queer language . . . rummy food [and] eccentric people"—becomes a stage for Mr. Theroux's verbal pyrotechnics and some fine jokes: "Regarding food, Estonians are accomplished generalists, like crows."

I laughed a lot, but guiltily. (I have been visiting Estonia for nearly two decades.) Then I re-read the book as the draft of a play about a grumpy, logorrheic stranger stranded in a strange, laconic land, an exercise that turned the joke back on Mr. Theroux. His frustration and mounting fury—by the end he even hated the cows—became the stuff of more respectably comedic delight.

But it is a comedy performed on a stage built on bones. Mr. Theroux is evidently appalled by the tyranny imposed on Estonia by Stalin in the wake of the 1940 annexation and, again, in nightmare reprise, upon its "liberation" from brutal Nazi occupation in 1944, even if he skimps on illustrations of the savagery involved. He understands how nearly 50 years of communist despotism still deform behavior in this "wounded country," in ways that cannot solely be put down to direct memory of atrocity. Some of the rudeness that Mr. Theroux encountered was simply the post-Soviet standard, seen from Vladivostok to Vilnius; and, as he grasps, some of the distance he felt in his interactions with Estonians was merely the product of the way that living under a dictatorship had curdled the reserve natural to the peoples of the eastern Baltic.

But his empathy only goes so far: Mr. Theroux wants the Estonians to overcome their "insistent and terrible past" by a collective act of "forgetting." A dubious suggestion made all the more so if it would mean bidding a final farewell to Estonia's prosperous interwar republic, the first period of self-government in seven centuries—the one time when Estonians were just themselves. The memory of that cruelly shattered idyll still haunts this indomitable people, but it inspires them too: Look at who we were. Look at what we did. Look at what we are doing again. Look at who we are. Mr. Theroux looked. But what he saw were extras in his own drama.

Mr. Stuttaford, who writes frequently about culture and politics, works in the international financial markets.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.