Andrus Kivirähk's THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH (Tr Christopher Moseley, Narr Aaron Landon)

I first learned about Andrus Kivirähk via the film adaptation of his novel November, which introduced the world to perhaps the greatest folk horror monster ever, the kratt, a wholly unique monster that starts out life as a pile of junk before animating it via a few drops of blood dedicated to, of course, the devil. Once animated, a kratt will help you with your farm chores and whatnot, but you have to keep it busy or else it will turn on you. In the movie, and so I presume, the novel, one kidnaps a calf and flies it through the air forming with it cinema's very first cowlicopter! Plus, there are werewolves! 

Alas, as of this writing, that novel of his does not appear to have been translated into English yet. But the film is occasionally streaming and was popular enough here that your local public library might have it on DVD, as mine did. So until the book is rendered in English (or you learn Estonian) this will have to do. But wait!

Another of Kivirähk's novels, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is so beloved in the author's home country of Estonia that it has been adapted into a board game there, and has been translated into many languages including English! And it's even available as an audio book, decently performed by new-to-me narrator Aaron Landon, who has a voice in the higher range that isn't the most delightful to hear in straight up narration but Landon did a wonderful job on the many characters' voices, many of whom aren't even human so I'm still pleased with and gladly recommend the audio edition.

Set in medieval Estonia right around the time that land is becoming Christian and adapting its culture along the lines of the rest of Europe, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is chiefly a novel of culture clashes. Our title character and narrator, Leemet, has been raised among a handful of hunter-gatherer forest people, where he fed on a diet of  roast venison, wolf's milk and owl's eggs and listened to stories of his mother and the bear that was her lover (prefiguring Leemet's sister Salma's own relationship with and eventual marriage to another bear) until accidentally killing Leemet's father the day daddy caught them in flagrante. The bear, Leemet learns, was a gentle soul and so regretted killing Leemet's father that it castrated itself and vowed never to see Leemet's mother again. 

And we're off!

We quickly learn that Leemet's people are unusual for much more interesting reasons than their diet or habit of, err, bear-loving; some are still staunchly clinging to a very strict and proscribing paganism centered around "sprites," which beings demand a lot of sacrifices at all times and have very short tempers; others have focused on maintaining a fascinating and useful tradition: the language called "Snakish." A reasonably fluent speaker of the language can, of course, befriend snakes, as Leemet quickly does, acquiring a charismatic and practically-minded adder named Ints for a best friend, but what most of Leemet's people seem to use it for nowadays is to command animals. They summon deer to lie down and allow themselves to be mercifully and humanely killed for meat and hides; they keep herds of wolves in barns like cows and tell them when to sleep and when to meekly allow themselves to be milked and when to allow humans to ride them like horses for their sylvan wars, though those wars are nearly as much a thing of the past as is the Frog of the North, a giant flying amphibian who protects the forest people but who can only be summoned by a large number of fluent Snakish speakers calling it down in unison. Nearly, but not completely; we do get a bit of wolf-riding in The Man Who Spoke Snakish, but it's only one swift element in one of the novel's most exciting and action-packed and anguished scenes.

Meanwhile, "progress" has happened to most of the rest of Estonia. Most of the region's people live in villages, have converted to Christianity (though maybe not as sincerely as the colonizing knights and monks might wish; most of them treat it more like a matter of fashion than of faith), and speak German. And they are very, very keen on proselytizing to the forest people and trying to shame them into moving out of the forest and into the villages, giving up their weird diets and freewheeling ways for lives sowing, tending and harvesting grain, making it into bread, and eating that instead of owl's eggs and wolves' milk. And of course, obeying the foreign monks and soldiers ("Iron Men" as the locals call them) who have subjugated everybody else.

While Leemet is still a boy learning his first Snakish words, he meets a village girl named Magdelena and through her comes into contact with her father, Johannes, the village elder, who barely lets the Lemeet and the boy he was exploring with get a word in edgewise before he's commanding them to go tell their parents that they must move into the village and be christened with new, biblical names and give up their culture altogether, really. Cowed, Leemet kind of agrees but doesn't wind up actually obeying; he'd much rather hang out with his uncle, the greatest still-living speaker of Snakish, who sees in Leemet perhaps the last person who will carry his people's traditions into the future -- even though, because Leemet's father once fell under the sway of village life and wanted to eat bread, Leemet was actually born in the village, and is thus shunned as a village person by about half of the dwindling population of the forest.

He soon comes to have more unusual companions, befriending a pair of local "primates" -- possibly some last remnants of the Neanderthals or Homo Erectus? -- who treasure other animals, especially lice, which they have carefully bred until they have one as big as a child. It loves to go for walks and to go swimming in a nearby lake, becoming a new source of friction among the forest people. 

The giant louse also loves Leemet's childhood tagalong, Hia, a plain and meek little girl whose parents are the most ardent remaining devotees of the sprite cult and force her to behave at all times as a paragon of forest virtue, toiling to exhaustion every day to butcher all the meat needed to feed the hundreds of wolves her family keeps in a gigantic barn, and being force-fed wolf milk even though she can't digest it. The scenes between this giant louse and Hia are some of the most charming in a book that is long on charm -- but also on violence. 

The violence in this book is mostly at least indirectly Leemet's fault; his fascination with the villagers brings his world into more direct conflict with theirs as he discovers to his horror that all the former forest people now living there have not only forgotten Snakish but regard snakes as servants of Satan and mostly refuse to believe that Leemet himself is not a werewolf preying on their pitiful flock of sheep. 

Leemet spends most of the story trapped between orthodoxies and struggling to be left in non-observant peace. The villagers (save one) harangue him to give up his wicked "pagan" ways while the hard core forest people maintain he'll never be good enough for them, either, no, not even when he emerges as the last living human who can speak Snakish. And just when he thinks he's found a way to settle down in happiness with a sweet wife and his snake friends, both orthodoxies attack, demonstrating that his choices will never be respected. 

How Leemet reacts to being doubly hemmed in and to gradually losing everything he cares about may shock some readers, who find themselves rooting for a pair (a long-lost ancestor shows up late in the book and quickly starts stealing every scene he's in!) of violent anti-zealots bent on avenging their losses on the whole rest of the world. It's a strange feeling to be cheering on a gory rampage with a high body count, but Kivirähk has fashioned his tale and portrayed his hero well; by the time the rampage begins we understand completely the feelings behind every blow struck, quixotic though they all are. 

If nothing else, we come away with one important lesson: don't fuck around with Estonians. You never know who might have a pair of venomous fangs concealed in their smile, ready to bite anyone who corners them. Have some respect.