Novel
Peetri kiriku kellad
Not translated into English
Ivar Grünthal · 1962
Synopsis
In the Tartu of the thirties, between Toome hill, the Tähtvere suburb and the banks of the Emajõgi, a teenager gifted for music learns about the life of the mind and about love. The novel in verse follows his maturing and his love story over three thousand lines, divided into twelve chapters like the hours on a clock face, in stanzas of four, six, seven and fourteen lines that the author interweaves and transforms according to an almost mathematical plan.
Context
The book was published in Gothenburg in 1962 by the press of the journal Mana. The Lund cooperative of Estonian writers had accepted it the year before, but the contract required the author to buy back three hundred and fifty of the six hundred copies; he refused and published it himself. It is the first part of a satirical diptych in verse, whose sequel, Laulu võim, also turned down at Lund, appeared in fragments in Mana from 1966 to 1986, then in volume in Tartu in 2008.
Who it is for
Three thousand lines of verse in Estonian, a hundred and sixty pages, never translated. One must know that the author, who had studied at Tartu, sets all the action there.
Prizes and reception
The first of its author's two novels in verse, a genre that almost no one else practised in Estonian letters.