{"id":304736,"date":"2016-09-20T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-20T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/09\/20\/interview-with-rein-raud\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:23","slug":"interview-with-rein-raud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/09\/20\/interview-with-rein-raud\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Rein Raud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Officially pubbing last Tuesday,<\/em> The Brother<\/a> by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen, is a spaghetti western and “philosophical gem” (West Camel<\/a>). It’s also Raud’s first novel to appear in English, following an appearance in the<\/em> Best European Fiction 2015<\/a> anthology.<\/em><\/p>\n

The book has received a couple of reviews already, including the one by West Camel<\/a> referenced above (“within its short length<\/em> [The Brother] manages to explore in great depth big ideas about human agency and determinism”), along with one in Kirkus<\/a> (“a slim but satisfying novel with archetypal resonances”), and at The Bookbinder’s Daughter<\/a> (“I was so thoroughly impressed with his language, imagery and characters”).<\/em><\/p>\n

To celebrate the release of this book, you can buy it now for $10 from our website<\/a> by using the code EASTWOOD<\/span> at check out. And to give you a few more reasons to want to grab a copy, below please find an interview with Rein Raud.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

The Brother<\/em><\/a> by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen<\/b><\/p>\n

The Brother<\/em>, Rein Raud\u2019s first full-length work to appear in English, is a spaghetti western that has been referred to as \u201ca lone Eastwood in the midst of a flock of van Dammes\u201d (Tarmo J\u00fcristo). It reads a bit like a fairy tale or mythical play, with a mysterious stranger (the \u201cBrother\u201d of the title) arriving in an unnamed town to right some wrongs. Below you\u2019ll find an interview Rebekka Lotman conducted with Raud when The Brother<\/em> was first published in Estonia. <\/p>\n

Rebekka Lotman: Is The Brother the kind of book that you yourself would readily pick up?<\/b><\/p>\n

Rein Raud: Yes\u2014I at least always try to only write books that I believe the world is lacking. And you\u2019re always most content with the latest thing you\u2019ve written, up until there\u2019s enough distance from it. I have to admit that the more time that passes, the more I also read books that counterbalance the visceral literary experiences of what I normally read. I don\u2019t want to find out how awful things actually are when I\u2019m reading, because I already know.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m reading a very depressing text, I can understand that it\u2019s outstanding literature, but when I think about what to start writing next, then I always tend to postpone pieces like that until better days, so to say, because it\u2019s already not easy being human. Good literature doesn\u2019t necessarily have to leave a bad aftertaste, even when it touches and moves you. In that sense, I\u2019ve also always wanted to write in a way that might offer others support.<\/p>\n

RL: How did The Brother<\/em> come to be?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: Unexpectedly. The first chapter popped into my head during a seminar on freedom, in which we were discussing the concepts of liberty, and I simply came up with it out of the blue to use as an example. Afterward, I went home and wrote it down, and the rest of the story suddenly began to branch off from there. Actually, I\u2019ve wanted to write a spaghetti western for a long time. Leafing through my old manuscripts recently, I found that my first attempt at the genre appeared in my first poetry collection, Barefoot, from 1980\u2014a prose-poetry cycle titled \u201cThe Diner.\u201d<\/p>\n

RL: What fascinates you about Baricco?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: Baricco has the most precise parlance out of all the living writers I know\u2014the ability to convey highly nuanced emotion in a light, descriptive language that is almost musical. Unfortunately, almost all of it has been lost in the Estonian-language translations I\u2019ve come across. But I hope that kind of language transcends the connection to a single author and permeates\u2014something like how Petrarch revised the sonnet in his time, or Chekhov\u2019s and Ibsen\u2019s theatrical language.<\/p>\n

A school of writing like that has actually already developed in Italian literature. For instance, Paolo Giordano, author of The Solitude of Prime Numbers<\/em>, which has won many literary awards, is a student of Baricco, and there are also others among rising new writers.<\/p>\n

RL: Where did you get the idea to combine him with Bulat Okudzhava and Clint Eastwood?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: Well, I wouldn\u2019t like to say I\u2019ve focused on the conscious combination of influences in my text\u2014more like I\u2019ve simply written, and then honestly acknowledged what parts of my intellectual biography shine through in the result. But Sergio Leone\u2019s spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood are my absolute favorites in that genre, as is Eastwood\u2019s own self-directed High Plains Drifter<\/em>, which they certainly strongly influenced.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s more compelling for me than the setting and plot developments is their strange method of depiction, which prefers a very large and very general scale over an ordinary medium one. Important things can happen in a way that we either don\u2019t see them at all because we\u2019re observing the scene too closely and they are out of frame, or else we see them from too far away and might not even notice them. I like that\u2014events and reality transpire in their own rhythm, but we never reach them; we only come closer.<\/p>\n

As for Okudzhava, some of his songs convey the hopes of the downtrodden very well. But musically, it\u2019s not crucial for the song in the least. There\u2019s much more of that in Beth Gibbon\u2019s performance of Rodrigo Le\u00e3o\u2019s \u201cLonely Carrousel\u201d or in T Bone Burnett. Even so, I hope that searching for the influences listed in the acknowledgements at the back of the book doesn\u2019t disturb the story itself for anyone.<\/p>\n

RL: The Brother<\/em> also speaks of justice. Is the world just?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: The world is the way it is. I myself would say it speaks rather of the winning\/losing axis. One secondary character in the novel says that everyone who wants to win by any means will always lose. Unfortunately, things aren\u2019t so simple in real life. But I suppose the establishment of the problem is defined a little by the genre, too: a nameless man wearing a big hat and a flapping coat arrives in a tiny town under the control of a corrupt group of men. What happens next is simply inevitable.<\/p>\n

RL: Love has an important role in the book. One definition of love you propose is quite beautiful: \u201clove springs from the ability to prefer imperfection over perfection.\u201d Did you intentionally try to highlight love, justice, and other human values?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: I\u2019ve always seen it as a problem when the negative characters in books and films are more interesting than the positive ones. Everyone \u201cgood\u201d is cookie-cutter or anemic, for the most part, or else they\u2019re not actually as good as they appear. I\u2019d like this to be different in my books, because in my opinion, real-life evil and spite are actually more boring than nobleness and idealism most of the time. I wouldn\u2019t be embarrassed if someone calls this sentimentality.<\/p>\n

RL: There are also philosophical musings, such as: \u201cFor what good is a name if it isn\u2019t tied up in a network, connected to faces over the span of time, discovered in the trails that could demarcate the whole world?\u201d Do you feel that you are in a teacher\u2019s role as a writer?<\/b><\/p>\n

RR: Not in this book, although my last, longer work Hector and Bernard was indeed a conscious attempt to bring Socratic philosophy into the contemporary world (thereby being more instructive). There are relatively few such places in this book, although I suppose I didn\u2019t manage to separate entirely from the kind of mindset that tends to rationally present inner truths. <\/p>\n

Remember, you can buy it for $10 by visiting our website<\/a> and using EASTWOOD<\/span> at checkout. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officially pubbing last Tuesday, The Brother by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen, is a spaghetti western and “philosophical gem” (West Camel). It’s also Raud’s first novel to appear in English, following an appearance in the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology. The book has received a couple of reviews already, including the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[64736,64726,28166,64756,64746,1646],"class_list":["post-304736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-adam-cullen","tag-brother","tag-open-letter-books","tag-rebekka-lotman","tag-rein-raud","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315876,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304736\/revisions\/315876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}