Brecht at Night

This "documentary novel," the latest of Estonian author Mati Unt's deadpan and playful works to be translated into English is about a little known period in the life of the great Bertoit Brecht, when the writer - having fled Nazi Germany - became stuck in Finland awaiting the visa that would allow him to leave Europe for the United States. As Brecht, the avowed communist, continues enjoying the bourgeois pleasures of pre-war life with his wife and tubercular mistress, the Soviet Union is not so quietly annexing Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; and the gulf between Brecht's preferred lifestyle and his inflammatory polemics grows larger and larger. Both affectionate and irreverent, this portrait if one of the twentieth century's great authors brings together a variety of comic styles, excerpts from contemporaneous documents, and Unt's trademark digressions, producing a kind of historical novel as interesting in interrogating the past as simply recreating it.

Mati Unt's novels The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, The Autumn Ball, Things in the Night, and Diary of a Blood Donor, among others, established him as one of the most prolific and well-regarded novelists in Estonia. He was also instrumental in bringing avant-garde theater to post-Soviet Union Estonia and was well known as a director.