Wanted:

Eeva Park (Estonia)

 

Will be questioned:

 

 

Personal file

Estonian poet, prose- and play writer Eeva Park was born into a writers' family in 1950 in Tallinn. She made her literary debut having 33 years of age, when her first poetry collection was published. Since 1990 she has turned to prose. Park’s short stories have found critical acclaim and have won some prizes.

 

Literary works

Eeva Park began as the author of mood poems depicting nature, mixing feeling and thought in her poetry. Later on when she started writing prose, shades of nostalgia and memory written down with the help of imagination appeared in her works. Her short prose works contain the anxieties and vicissitudes of Soviet reality.

 

Park's first novel “Dust and Wind” (Tolm ja tuul) forms an autobiographical dilogy with “A Student of Laughter” (Naeru õpilane). It is a post-WWII saga, which follows the fate of a family. It depicts the world through the eyes of a protagonist who resembles the author herself and her efforts to shrug off her parents' heritage with a madness, which lurks in the family and society itself.

 

In the latest work, the novel “Trap in Infinity” (Lõks lõpmatuses) the author has found liberation and instead of reminiscing concentrates on current themes of brutality. This novel is an exciting social novel describing a young woman who is smuggled into Germany to work as a prostitute and her look back over her life up to present. She returns illegally to Estonia and starts a new life in a shabby slum district with all its scavengers and selfishness, but then she kills her smuggler and ultimately herself. Both Berlin and Tallinn are depicted with feeling and Park describes the less attractive sides of the welfare state. When showing what the trade in human beings in Eastern Europe is really like, Park does not exaggerate, but does manage to generate powerful associations and descriptions. The novel could also be called a psychological thriller, that cuts deep into an abscess of society and keeps its readers enthralled to the end.

The most famous works:

”Acrid Wind” (Mõrkjas tuul), poetry collection, 1983
”Light of the Night”  (Öö valgus), poetry collection, 1990
”Dust and Wind”  (Tolm ja tuul), novel, 1992
”The Man Who Remembered the Elephants” (Mees, kes mäletas elevante), short stories, 1994
”A Student of Laughter” (Naeru õpilane), novel, 1998
”The Pass to the Merry-go-round” (Pääse karussellile),  short stories, 2000
”A Trap in Infinity”  (Lõks lõpmatuses), novel, 2003

Critics comment the Wanted 

A striving to avoid standing in the shadow of both her parents marks Park’s works. As a rule, she depicts the world as seen through a woman’s eyes, but so far, she has not been interested in feminist discourse. Her heroine is a strong personality who wants to put her to the test and to win; she yearns for love, warmth and a harmonious family and wants to be appreciated as a person. Eeva Park’s method, which she uses skilfully, is rather closely related to Psychological Realism. Her works contain psychic tension; Park's use of language is succinct and precise.

The last novel ”A Trap in Infinity” (Lõks lõpmatuses) is a challenge to those who, either cynically or short-sightedly, talk about prostitution as a form of enterprise that needs regulation. It could be said that the road that leads to prostitution in a post-socialist society is often even more trivial, the deals are even cheaper, fewer words are wasted on the subject and the social background is even clearer.

Source: http://www.estlit.ee/