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 Her gothic appearance chimes with the darkness of her writing
and its themes of oppression, banishment, censorship, collusion
and rape.
Author of the 2008 award-winning "Purge" and four other
published novels, Oksanen is headlining at the Frankfurt Book
Fair, the trade's biggest annual get-together, where Finland is
this year's guest of honor.
The unsmiling 37-year-old is single-minded, repeatedly turning
the conversation back to the message she wants to convey: the
world should know about the suffering of the Estonian people
under Soviet and Nazi-German occupation.
"We have seen in the Ukrainian war that western European
countries actually do not know the history of the eastern
European countries and in that way it needs to be written in
their own voice," she says.
"For 50 years the voice was the Soviet voice and now it is the
time to do something about it. It has to be done, otherwise
people do not understand what is happening there," she says.
Oksanen is convinced that, 23 years after the fall of the Soviet
Union, Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power is a
serious threat for Eastern European democracies.
The daughter of a Finnish father and Estonian mother, she grew
up in Finland but traveled regularly to the Baltic republic to
visit her Estonian grandparents as a child.
With a population of 1.3 million, Estonia was occupied for
centuries by Denmark, Sweden and Russia, gaining independence in
1918 only to be annexed in 1940 by the Soviet Union.
Oksanen is convinced that today's Russia, under Putin, has
similar expansionist ambitions.
"We have seen this so many times when people wanted to believe
that Russia does not want to be aggressive," she says.
"Dictators will not stop. People are dying all the time. Putin
is not going to stop that and we cannot pretend that we believe
he's going to stop," she says in a deep, smoky voice.
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"Purge" -- Oksanen's international breakthrough, and winner of
France's FNAC Prize and the Nordic Council Literature Prize -- tells
the story of two Estonian women over two generations.
Both women survive sexual abuse, keep a criminal secret and have to
defend their existence in repressive regimes. The story spans 60
years until 1992, when Estonia regained its independence after the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
In her first book "Stalin's Cows" in 2003, Oksanen wrote about a
young bulimic Finnish-Estonian woman, symbolically vomiting out her
problems with her family and her origins.
Reviews at the time talked about a fine line between history and
autobiography -- Oksanen too suffered from eating disorders.
In Frankfurt, Oksanen is promoting her new book "When the Doves
Disappeared", to be published in English in February.
She continues the Estonian themes, this time covering the period
during and after World War Two when the country was caught between
Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, and focuses on
collaborators.
"There are plenty of memoirs and biographies of those who were
deported for example to Siberia, Gulag stories... But there are no
confessions of collaborators," she says.
"They never want to tell their story and that's the corpus of
identity stories that we are lacking."
(Editing by Louise Ireland)
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