Diary of a Blood Donor

by Mati Unt, Ants Eert (Translator)

Overview

In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564784964
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	05/28/2008
Series:	Eastern European Literature Series
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.69(w) x 8.01(h) x 0.67(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mati Unt (1944-2005) was an Estonian writer who began his writing career at the age of nineteen, with a "naive novel" entitled Good-bye, Yellow Cat. From this early beginning, Unt established a broad reputation in the artistic and intellectual circles of Estonia as a writer of fiction, plays, and criticism. His novels The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, Murder in a Hotel, The Autumn Ball, and Things in the Night, among others, established Unt as one of the most prolific and well-regarded novelists in Estonia. In addition to his own writing, he was instrumental in bringing avant-garde theater to post-Soviet Estonia, and was well known as a director.

Ants Eert is the translator of several Estonian novels, and is the author of a fantasy-adventure novel. He is a retired engineer.

What People are Saying About This

Mihkel Mutt

There are people . . . whose role in their domestic culture is nothing less than unique, which makes it difficult to draw any parallels when trying to introduce them. In Estonia, Mati Unt belongs among such people. He is simultaneously a first-class writer, theatre director, critic and columnist, scenographer and ideologue. . . . Unt's unique role in Estonia has been that of the 'conveyer of ideas.'

Eric Dickens

[Unt was] one of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia.
— CONTEXT

Kate Saunders

Mati Unt was one of Estonia's most influential writers. . . . [He] had a splendid detachment and a rampant imagination.
— The Times

Editorial Reviews

a disturbing and comic tale of obsession, politics and the vagaries of literature.' -Sam Munson, New York Post

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

Estonian novelist Unt (1944-2005) gets a bang out of remixing Dracula as a postmodern fable and a metaphor for postcommunist life. A writer receives a summons to meet a stranger in Leningrad, and, after much internal strife, he decides to go. Once the writer is in the city, the novel is thrust into an underworld of vampires, blood suckers and superstition. Unt fills the novel with amusing asides and comments, indicating his awareness of the thinness of his plot. He clearly prefers narrative playfulness to straightforward storytelling here, and though the novel is a bit of a chore to get through, hints of vampirism as a powerful metaphor for communism and postcommunist upheaval are sprinkled throughout like allegorical Easter eggs. (May)

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