Border State

What was it you said again? "You have a strange look in your eyes -- like a bystander observing the world. You're not French, are you?"So the letter from one near stranger to another begins, and so begins Tonu Onnepalu's novel of a life lived on the margin where East and West uneasily meet. At home in neither his native land nor his adopted country, the unnamed narrator writes from a border state that transcends national boundaries. His letter, this novel, is a precise depiction of that state, of a consciousness forged by poverty so harsh that even the sunlight is a treasure: "I come from a country where the sun is as rare as a diamond, an incredible gold coin which is examined in the light and tested by biting....In the autumn the sun is stashed with potatoes and rutabagas in cellars".Driven by the need to confess, the narrator recounts the circumstances surrounding the murder of his wealthy male lover. His confession is a painfully sharp rendering of what it means to straddle the lines between East and West, rich and poor, light and dark -- to live flush within "a series of impoverished, dark countries which helplessly bemoan their still-born histories".A story of misguided passion, Border State offers a rare, brilliantly realized account of a lost man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by the world that is subsuming his own and inhabiting a West in which "all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other". The tale of his journey, in which disillusion and murder become inextricably linked, is a compelling map of the vexed territory between scarcity and surfeit, longing and greed, lucidity andmadness.