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    The Brother
    The Brother
    The Brother
    Ebook126 pages2 hours

    The Brother

    By Rein Raud

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Eduard Vilde Literary Award

    The Brother opens with a mysterious stranger arriving in a small town controlled by a group of menmen who recently cheated the stranger's supposed sister out of her inheritance and mother's estate. Resigned to giving up on her dreams and ambitions, Laila took this swindling in stride, something that Brother won't stand for. Soon after his arrival, fortunes change dramatically, enraging this group of powerful men, motivating them to get their revenge on Brother. Meanwhile, a rat-faced paralegal makes it his mission to discover Brother's true identity . . .

    The first novel of Rein Raud's to appear in English, The Brother is, in Raud's own words, a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco. With its well-drawn characters and quick moving plot, it takes on more mythic aspects, lightly touching on philosophical ideas of identity and the ruthless way the world is divided into winners and losers.

    Rein Raud is the author of four books of poetry, six novels, and several collections of short fiction. He's also a scholar in Japanese studies and has translated several works of Japanese into Estonian. One of his short pieces appeared in Best European Fiction 2015.

    Adam Cullen was born and educated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but currently resides in Tallinn where he's translated dozens of plays, stories, and poems. He's also translated three published novels, including Radio by Tõnu Õnnepalu and The Cavemen Chronicle by Mihkel Mutt.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Letter
    Release dateAug 22, 2016
    ISBN9781940953458
    The Brother
    Author

    Rein Raud

    Born in 1961 in Tallinn, Estonia, Rein Raud is a novelist, journalist, translator and academic with expertise in Japanese literature and philosophy. His novels, e Brother (2008) and e Reconstruction (2012, winner of the Estonian State Prose Award), have been translated into English, and his work on the theory of culture, Meaning in Action (2016), in English. He co-authored Practices of Selfhood (2015) in English along with Zygmunt Bauman. He has translated Dante’s Vita nuova as well as books from a number of Japanese thinkers into Estonian. He teaches at universities in Estonia and Finland, and has hosted a philosophical talk show on Estonian TV.

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    • 5/5
      This short novel is dubbed a "spaghetti western" by its Estonian author. Although I have seen movies of that genre, I've never really studied them as a fan so I may have missed some of the references. (There is a brief mention in the acknowledgements for those of us who missed things.) But we used to watch them at parties in the 1980's. Maybe those viewings left something buried in my sub-conscious because I really enjoyed this book without really knowing why. Take away any knowledge of "spaghetti westerns"and it is still a darned good read.

    Book preview

    The Brother - Rein Raud

    The day that had begun bright with sunshine darkened abruptly into black clouds in the afternoon, and the couple booms of thunder were followed by a downpour so heavy that not a single window was left open in the small town. Nothing and no one occupied the main square apart from a taxi, the driver of which was also already about to lose hope, when he saw approaching from the opposite side of the square a tall man dressed in a wide-brimmed hat, a drenched overcoat, and knee-high boots—and who was strolling toward him through the storm with an unflinching tranquility, as if he paid no heed to the dreadful weather.

    He’ll get the car wet, the taxi-driver thought, but at least I won’t have been waiting here for nothing.

    The man indeed stopped next to the taxi and opened the door.

    Are you free? he asked.

    Yes, I am, the taxi-driver replied.

    Then that makes two of us, the man said, slammed the door shut, and strolled onward through the rain and into the howling darkness.

    People differ. There are those who do harm to others, and those to whom harm is done; some of the latter are the kind it would seem fair to attack because they have enough strength for retaliation, and then there are others, who in their vileness outright provoke confrontation, as the harm done to them is nothing more than revenge that restores the great balance.

    Laila was none of these, for although she attracted injustice like bees to heather, all who did her wrong were nevertheless secretly embarrassed. The lawyer, whom she had asked to handle the inheritance affairs after her mother’s death, had looked away as he placed paper after paper of complicated legal wording on the desk for Laila to sign, and the notary, who read the long and incoherent documentation aloud to her, occasionally felt a lump rise to his throat when he thought about what would become of that pale young woman following the successful execution of the transaction. Even the bailiff, who came to evict Laila from the Villa and record her assets, spoke more politely with her than with anyone else, and unprecedentedly, both the moving truck and the movers, who removed their hats when they greeted Laila, were provided at the company’s expense. Her current landlord was no different either—he frequently cursed himself for asking that kind of rent for the tiny attic-room with a ceiling that leaked a little in one corner (with the extra obligation of Laila doing his family’s laundry for free); and even the goateed antiquarian, at whose shop Laila had finally gotten a job, constantly caught himself thinking that he was paying her shamelessly little, which of course caused him to ruminate on human nature and shake his head, but resulted in nothing else. Or else he would eat an éclair with his afternoon coffee, which was, in reality, bad for his health.

    Laila herself had grown accustomed to her bad luck, just as children who manage to comprehend the world will grow accustom to their own mortality, and in truth, she didn’t even particularly hope that anything might ever be different.

    Until the knock at the door.

    I would have expected anything, Brother said while unlacing his knee-high boots; the brother, of whose existence she hadn’t the slightest clue just a moment earlier, but whom—she now knew—she had awaited for so long.

    I would have expected anything, but not that, said Brother. When I arrived, the Villa’s front door was locked and no one came to open it when I rang the doorbell. I went around back to the garden to see if you were walking the paths or sitting in the gazebo, but my heart was already pounding with the fear of finding, perhaps, that the windows facing the yard had been boarded up and not a single soul occupied the house anymore, because I had come too late. Still, I couldn’t have even fathomed what I would actually see. There were young, handsome people gathered on the patio and music playing; no doubt everyone who had been expected was already accounted for. But you weren’t among them. A young woman with short, chestnut-brown hair smiled at me from across the balustrade and lifted her champagne glass in greeting, but a curly-haired young man was already peeking hostilely over her shoulder to see what business I had there. He knew where to direct me when I mentioned you, although I realized immediately that as far as he was concerned, I had ruined the evening. And right at that moment it started to rain, even though the sky had been cloudlessly blue just a moment before, so they all had to move indoors and I waved to them, but no one noticed.

    What does that matter now, Laila said. What matters is that you found me.

    That does matter, Brother agreed.

    Tell me about yourself, Laila said. Tell me about Father and about everything that’s important but that I don’t know about.

    Everything that’s important. There was too much of it. He could have told Laila stories about their father and his artist-friends, and about how they could debate the night away on the subject of light and colors; or about the orphanage and the windowless trains that whizzed past outside. He could have told stories about fleeing and his nomadic years, or about the French Foreign Legion and the sand grinding between his teeth; or instead about the ships and the harbors—about the two weeks in Malacca, for example, which he had to survive without a single cent; or about how he had been a night watchman at a library in the Netherlands and read everything he came across by flashlight while lying on his belly on the floor between the massive shelves every night, and how he had committed as much as he could to memory. He could have told the story of his father’s very last message, in which he asked him to locate his sister and, if necessary, to help her in times of peril—yes, he could have told her that story while omitting the main point, of course, for it wasn’t the time yet.

    He could have—indeed, all of that was important. Yet, he didn’t.

    Let’s talk about you, instead, he said.

    I’ve never asked myself what someone else would do in my situation. For me, Monday has always been on Monday and Friday is on Fridays. From quite an early age, it was clear to me that cause and effect only have a connection if we ourselves put it there, and that whomever is punished is the one to blame. And so, I decided not to scream: the strength it takes for cursing the walls that I dash headfirst into time and again could help me to see through them instead—as if they weren’t even there. I was sixteen and I’d been left for the first time, not counting when Father went away. I was colorless and frail like a flower that has grown in a dim room. If I quit asking, I realized, then people will entirely forget that I exist, except for when I happen to cross their path, and back then, I didn’t know to be afraid of that kind of outcome.

    "And

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