Purge (2010)

Purge is not for the faint hearted. The love in it is strong, lusty and consuming. The pain is searing, and you can only hear the tearing of the heart that may take more than an eternity to mend. Its terror is coated with such shame and cruelty that you want to cry out loud. It's briliant and it hits you hard - very hard. 

A brilliantly written story, it is woven around two female characters and spans three generations. It recounts the private tragedies endured by one family in the face of the public tragedies that revolve around the Soviet occupation of Estonia.

Allide Truu’s isolated life in rural Estonia is disrupted by the sudden appearance of Zara, who is clearly in need of help. As the two women circle each other in a mutual rhythm of mistrust and wariness of the other’s motives, their past stories are revealed in a series of flashbacks, leading to a final climactic moment in which one woman atones for her murderous past and bitter jealousies, and the other escapes the brutality of sexual trafficking.

In a way, it is the purging of their personal stories, and it is a mirror to the national attempt to purge the brutal history of Estonia. It’s a sad story, whichever way you look at it – the hardships of resistance work; the dangers and uncertainties of living in a community, where secret agents are constantly watching one’s every move; sexual violence both at the hands of the occupying forces for whom it’s an interrogation technique, and at the hands of post-independence Russian mafia for whom it’s part and parcel of a booming prostitution trade; and attempts by Estonians to hold on to their language and culture.

There are strong currents of sibling rivalry, unrequited love and lust, betrayal, as well as mankind’s infinite instinct for survival that underline the actions taken and the decisions made. Allide’s sister Ingel, Ingel’s husband Hans and her daughter Linda all become victims of the complexities that tug at the opposing spectrum between loyalty and betrayal.

Sofi Oksanen © Toni Härkönen

The narrative is woven in the most skillful manner. Part history, part murder-mystery, part national narrative, Purge alternates between the past and present, and covers a number of important events that shaped the country’s narrative. We see the events as they touch and scar the lives of Ingel, Allide and their family lives.

The characters live through the German occupation of Estonia, the Red Army’s forced rule, the resistance fighters waging a battle from within the forests of Estonia, the adaption of kolkhoz or the collective farming method, the deportation of Estonians and the unfair methods used to pick who got deported, the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath (socially and environmentally), and the anti-Soviet sentiments that run thorugh the social fabric of Estonia.

Translated by Lola Rogers in 2010, Oksanen wrote the original as a play titled Puhdistus (2007), which then led to the novel of the same name (2008). It’s her third published work, and follows Stalinin Lehmät (Stalin's Cows, 2003) and Baby Jane (2005). Purge has won a number of awards, and there is a film and an opera in the works too. An absolute page turner, Purge is a story that is surely going places.

Below is an interview conducted by UpNorth.eu with Oksanen on 'Purge.' It touches on her personal connection to Estonia, what led her to tell this particular story, moving from the oral tradition to the written word, and the challenges of talking about what are inherently political and sensitive stories.



© UpNorth Television


Oksanen, S. (2010). Purge. (L. Rogers, Trans.). London: Atlantic Books. (Original work published 2008).