night lights
brecht at night
this documentary novel the latest of estonian author mati unts deadpan and playful works to be translated into english is about a little known period in the life of the great bertolt 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 bb 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 brechts preferred lifestyle and his inflammatory polemics grows larger and larger . both affectionate and irreverent this portrait of one of the twentieth centurys great authors mixes together a variety of comic styles excerpts from contemporaneous documents and unts trademark digressions producing a kind of historical novel as interested in interrogating the past as simply recreating it .