May 2018

Part of the Peter Owen World Series: Baltics

A feminist One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest...

Institutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest to which she would run to safety, and, of course, the enormous talking green crow who appeared when she most needed him. The green crow is a conceited, boisterous creature who follows the novel’s nameless protagonist throughout her life, until the day that the crow’s presence begins to embarrass her. Confined to a tedious domestic life, she is desperate to hide the crow’s very existence. Failing to do so, she is placed in a psychiatric hospital. Can she repress and renounce her acerbic, sharp-beaked daemon? Or learn to love herself, bird and all? Ulberga’s The Green Crow is a fable about womanhood, individual freedom and the strait-jacket of traditional gender roles.

Translated from the Latvian by Žanete Vēvere Pasqualini

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KRISTīNE ULBERGA (b. 1979, Riga) is a Latvian novelist best known for her young adult novels The Virtual Angel (Virtuālais eņģelis, 2009) and I Don’t Read Books (Es grāmatas nelasu, 2010). Her first novel for adults, The Green Crow (Zaļā vārna), was first published in 2012 and won the Raimonds Gerkens Prize and the Annual Latvian Literature Prize.

Photo © Janis Deinats