Muttermilch

My milk was bitter, full of despair, milk of decay. I kept my child safe from it. Mother and daughter - the generations of 1944 and 1969 - are the narrating voices of the novel. The mother is exiled to the Latvian province after a scandal involving a war veteran. Her professional career in Leningrad comes to an abrupt end due to a state that robs her of the chance to realize herself both professionally and socially. Isolation gnaws at her life, and bitterness and powerlessness shape her relationship with her daughter. The grandmother offers her what the mother cannot provide: love and a home where she grows up - almost - like an exemplary Soviet citizen. The family encounters other outcasts and nonconformists, pious Russian women, a hermaphrodite, an opposition teacher. Life constantly demands compromises from them that they are unwilling to make. Until the signs of freedom begin to stir. What are they still capable of as political change starts in the country and in Europe? Full of symbolism and sensitivity, Nora Ikstena tells the story of the love for freedom and the drama of life up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.