Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić (thoughts)

Remember last year, when I gushed about White is for Witching? And a little while later, it appeared on several other blogs, mainly with bloggers shaking their heads over the weirdness of it (one blog actually wrote that anyone who said they enjoyed it was a) lying and b) pretentious)? I don’t want that to happen again. So I shall say up front: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is not structured or written like a traditional novel. It is experimental, and you won’t always know exactly what is going on. But it’s magic, and I loved every page of it. :D

Ugrešić is a Croatian author, and she’s played with the Slavic fairy tale character Baba Yaga (powerful witch who looks like an ugly old woman and lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs) as part of the Canongate Myth series. As you might imagine, Baba Yaga is a character ripe for feminist retelling, and the book hit all the right notes for me. It’s divided into three very different parts; the first part is told in first-person by a middle-aged woman reflecting on her relationship with her old mother (who has characteristics/features that resemble a certain someone), who has Alzheimer’s or dementia or something like that. I found this to be convincing and touching; I empathised with aspects of both the daughter and mother’s behavior, and I loved seeing the little Baba Yaga touches. Towards the end, the daughter goes on a journey to Romania, to a small village her mother used to love, and is joined by a young scholar who is a little bit stalker-ish; I was fascinated to see how this new relationship would unfold. On its own, and with a different title, this could be a relatively straightforward modern novella: Ugrešić is a powerful writer and she depicts a mother-daughter relationship that seemed completely authentic without conjuring up any cliches. The next part becomes a little crazier: three older women (one very old, who we seen find out is the mother from the first section) arrive at a spa in the Czech Republic. Many hijinks ensue, which reflect on Slavic fairy tale motifs, and there are some coincidences of Dickensian proportions. One again, I loved seeing how Ugrešić interpreted old stories for a modern setting, and the characters, while being ‘types,’ seemed to jump out of the pages. This is the section that I expect would lose some readers. And finally, the third part was quite cheeky: it’s a letter from the young scholar we saw in section one to the editor/publisher of the first two sections of the novel, explicating the connections between them and fairy-tale Baba Yaga, with many academic discursions on Slavic fairy tales in general. The fictional aspect comes in with the scholar’s increasingly unreliable narration, but for the most part this is nonfiction literary/cultural analysis. So essentially, Ugrešić gets to explain her own writing to the reader! I don’t think there are many times when a novel gets away with something like that, but this is one of them. It fit with the reclaiming of older women, a group marginalised, as people who still have their own identity; it with the postmodern feel to the fiction in the first two sections; and it just fit with the whip-smart intelligence and tongue-in-cheek irreverence of Ugrešić’s writing.

In short, while this probably isn’t for everyone, I adored it and can’t wait to read more of Ugrešić. And if my description sounds interesting, I encourage you to give it a go: it is experimental but still accessible (much clearer than White is for Witching), the writing is stunning, the characters memorable, and the feminist aspects will make you do a couple mental fist pumps. Not to mention, thanks to the third section, even if you don’t know anything about Baba Yaga beforehand you’ll still understand the references! ;)

Suggested Companion Reads

• White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (if it leaves you in the mood for more postmodern fiction with supernatural elements)
• A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka (another woman-focused story set in Central Europe, although this one is a straightforward ‘family epic’ style novel)
• Troll: a Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (another non-traditionally structured novel by a European author about a fairy tale/folklore figure)
• Alone! Alone! by Rosemary Dinnage (a collection of essays by Dinnage about women who stood out from the mainstream in some way)
• Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King (another novel in which mythic characters interact with everyday, modern people)
• An Oresteia trans. by Anne Carson (Carson has reimagined this seminal Greek myth/legend by putting the trilogy together with three plays written by three different generations of Greek playwrights, with different views of the raw material)
• Without a Name and Under the Tongue by Yvonne Vera (two novellas, published together, that also deal with feminist themes and challenge the reader to deduce what’s going on)
• The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt (I read this pre-blogging, so now review, but it features a postmodern literary grad student who goes on a quest to write a biography of a famous biographer, in the process living out his adventures; the meta-fiction structure is similar)