I protected my child from it,” the mother says. “My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. As the title suggests, milk emerges as an underpinning theme. The mother is clearly damaged psychologically by the political repression under Soviet rule. These chemicals would hang like a cloud around my mother: there when she returned from exhausting night duty at the maternity hospital still there when, after long hours of wakefulness, she caught up on sleep at home,” the daughter recalls. “Throughout my childhood the smell of medicine and disinfectant replaced the fragrances of mother’s milk. With her mother – her father is not in the picture – focused on her medical career, the daughter is mostly left to herself and grows up cared for and supported by her loving grandmother and stepfather. The daughter, born in 1969, the same year as the author, grows up in Riga, where her grandmother and stepfather have an apartment. In response, the newborn is quickly whisked away to Riga, Latvia’s capital, in a suitcase. On the eve of Christmas that year, Soviet soldiers, the new occupying force, plunder her parents’ yard, ransack the house, and take the father away. The mother is born in 1944, towards the end of World War II, and shortly before occupied Latvia is liberated from the Nazis. Soviet Milk is narrated in alternating sections by the mother and her daughter, both of whom are unnamed. It is also the story of three generations of women – each trying to cope with the Soviet regime in their own way.
Soviet Milk depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in Soviet-ruled Latvia between 19, the mother’s life span and also the beginning and ending of the Soviet period. Her latest novel, Soviet Milk (Mātes piens), has now been published in English. In her prose, which is marked by an elaborate style and detailed approach to language, she often reflects on life, death, love, and faith. Ikstena has published a novel almost every year since. Her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories under the title Nieki un izpriecas (Trifles and Joys), appeared in 1995. After obtaining a degree in philology from the University of Latvia, she studied English literature at Columbia University in New York. Nora Ikstena, a prose writer and essayist, is one of the most influential and widely translated writers in Latvia.
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