Embedded Files
By Mihkel Mutt, translated by Adam Cullen, Dalkey Archive Press, 2015, 416 pages
Reviewed by Michael Zuzel, July 8, 2020
Preamble to the Review
I hesitated to review this book for our little collective because:
I read it more than a year ago, in preparation for our choir’s Summer 2019 concert tour of the Baltic states.
It is definitely a niche read; unless you’re interested in Baltic history or are thinking of traveling to Estonia soon, I wouldn’t recommend it.
It’s a good novel but not great one—although, as I’ll explain, I’m probably not entirely qualified to judge.
But something else I wrote, something tangential yet critical to the novel, was just published by Atlas Obscura. So this review is just a sneaky way to steer you toward that article.
The Review
The Caveman Chronicle is, at its core, a semi-comic novel about a bunch of people who hang out in a bar. A northern European, Cold War-era Cheers, if you will.
The bar is called The Cave, and it’s the underground nightspot in Tallinn, Estonia, where all the artists, academics, and insurrectionists hang out. They’ve been doing it for decades; the book opens shortly after Sputnik and closes around the dawn of the iPhone.
The novel traces Estonia’s development from Soviet occupation through independence and the struggle to create a new, democratic, market-economy nation. The Cavemen include Juku, the narrator, who studied linguistics and worked as a Persian translator until the 1991 revolution, when he became a gossip columnist; Mati, a magazine editor who once loved to poke fun at his Soviet overlords and ends up as a leader of the Estonian independence movement; and Teedu, a college professor who believed that cooperating with the Soviets was the only way to survive and is left emotionally and spiritually adrift once they depart.
Many other characters—a musician turned culture minister, a Finnish poet who makes a living as a tour guide, an autistic savant who appears mainly in disturbing letters to Juku—drift in and out of the 400-page narrative. There is much discussion of the role of creative expression in the shaping of society, much worry about which of one’s friends are or were secretly spying for the KGB, and much vodka.
Much, much vodka.
The underlying theme seems to be that, although the coming of Estonian independence was welcome and worth celebrating, it did carry a cost. The Soviet occupation was without question repressive and murderous; in addition to bans on Estonian culture and music, Moscow conscripted, deported, and executed thousands of Baltic citizens. Yet the communist system also provided most people with a level of security and predictability that suddenly vanished with the coming of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Some Estonians were able to adapt to the change and flourish; others were not.
The Cavemen Chronicle is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Most of the third section takes place over the few days in 1988 when Estonians finally asserted their independence, not through armed insurrection but by mass sing-alongs of banned patriotic songs. The “Singing Revolution” is no doubt the most profound moment of the last half-century of Estonian history, but the Cavemen spend much of the time engaged in a “who’s on first”-style debate about whether to participate in the rebellion or just keep drinking and pretend later to have been there.
Nonetheless, portions of the novel were, for me, quite tedious; I’m sure that were I an Estonian, I would have better appreciated the discussions of the country’s political and cultural divisions. I also found the lack of substantive female characters to be disappointing; the Cavemen are literally all men, and though they talk about their wives and girlfriends as the most important things in their lives, those women are seldom seen. But no doubt the book accurately reflects the gender divide that existed at the time and probably largely still does. And overall The Cavemen Chronicle opens a fascinating window on the lives of people most Americans don’t even know exist.
The Cavemen Chronicle didn’t have a listing in Wikipedia, so I created one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cavemen_Chronicle
Postscript to the Review
The Cave is a real place in Tallinn, and it played a role in the real Singing Revolution. Cynthia and I had beers there while on our tour. Read my article and see my photos here:
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