On the second day of spring a body is found, rolled up in a blood-soaked rug and stuffed behind the boiler of a run-down apartment building. It is identified as the body of Ida Tepper, an eccentric and vain woman who spent the previous day on frivolous pursuits: "If Ida Tepper weren’t so rich, she’d be locked up," her hairstylist said when she arrived for her appointment. Ida Tepper felt no presentiment of disaster; in fact, she was buoyed by the sense of a new life beginning. And, in a way, it was.

Death in the Glebe is set in a fashionable area of Ottawa. Inhabitants of the Glebe, we are told, are willing to pay exhorbitant rents to live there, even in mansions-become-tenements like Hardon Hall, where the body is discovered. The tenants of Hardon Hall are an unsavoury lot. From the top floor, where "slum landlord extraordinaire" Kevin Hardon abuses drugs and his wife, to the basement, where various street people and petty criminals hide from the light, the layers of Canadian society are stacked in order of importance.

None of these characters are sentimentalized—if anything, they are so unsavoury as to be off-putting. Readers of Ilze Berzins’ previous book, the autobiographical Happy Girl, will recognize the moral relativism that does not render any of her characters fully sympathetic. All of them, from Jerry, the seedy caretaker, to Robert, Ida Tepper’s resentful gigolo, have their own agendas; several have reason to wish Ida dead. The women are more favourably portrayed than the men, though they tend toward victimhood of one kind or another. The most likeable character is a pet-loving artist named Doreen, who attracts the romantic interest of one of the detectives assigned to the case. Doreen’s boyfriend has recently left her for another woman; devastated, she takes refuge in her painting, concluding that Art and the company of dogs are more sustaining than human relations.

Death in the Glebe follows the conventions of the murder mystery, though the solution of the puzzle is disappointing in its dependence upon a botched autopsy and the inability of the police to locate a bloody murder scene in the very building in which it was committed. It is depressing enough to imagine that such things may happen with regularity in the real world; it is one of the hopeful conventions of detective novels that they do not. The outcome, which is inventive, should not hang on such unsatisfying devices.

Justice, if it can be said to be done, is approximate, and a broad strain of social satire runs through Death in the Glebe. "Money creates justice," Detective Barry Mullins says soon after the discovery of the body. He knows that the murder of a wealthy woman will remain central until the perpetrator is found, while the unsolved murders of the powerless will be forgotten. There is no expectation of justice for crimes committed against the socially insignificant. Petty criminals can slide away out of sight, confident that the police will not find it worthwhile to pursue them. Special barbs are reserved for cults that prey upon the needs and neuroses of their followers, seemingly impervious to police intervention.

The episodic structure of Death in the Glebe is similar to that of television crime shows and, while this gives the story a certain momentum, it can be disorienting until the many characters are sorted out. In spite of its deficiencies, the story progresses with unflagging energy, and the broad and sometimes maliciously drawn characters do eventually overcome their own sketchiness. The book succeeds best in being wildly personal, as the thoughts and prejudices of the author are never far from the surface.

This is a portrait of a society in which money and status determine all. Only money can afford protection to women, and single women without it are particularly vulnerable. Even those with money and position, like the unfortunate Ida Tepper, may find themselves vulnerable in unexpected ways.

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on the SVEIKS.com site.)

Latvian writers have spent much of the 20th century in their own or in Soviet company, cut off from Western literary developments. Now they are catching up with a vengeance, as demonstrated in "New Latvian Fiction," an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction produced with the support of Soros Foundation Latvia.

Reading this volume (meticulously guest edited by Nora Ikstēna and Rita Laima Krieviņa) is a bit like a jog with the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland—a breathless, exhilarating and sometimes confusing experience.

Some stories can be completely understood only from within the culture; Pauls Bankovskis’ "The Week of Golden Silence," for example, hinges on a children’s rhyme that loses something in the translation. The story portrays love as a child’s game; a bet of silence leads to the realization by two lovers that, really, "There’s nothing to say."

Several authors are engaged in late-blooming love affairs with post-modern literary techniques. In "Beckett is Alive: Texts to Myself," Guntis Berelis speculates on knowledge and reality: "If we assume that Beckett isn’t dead then we can never be completely convinced that he isn’t dying at this very moment … Beckett is continually dying." Aivars Ozoliņš’ "Tale No. 13" is a playful and ultimately exhausting set of variations on a story; literature is a game to this author, who claims that words "have a hollow centre." Jānis Vēveris takes it one step further—his story "Eventide" begins as poetic stream of consciousness but ultimately turns on itself and on its narrator, telling him that his cleverness and facility are merely the failure of his art.

Other stories have a deep and sensual connection to the real, as opposed to the literary, world. Andra Neiberga’s "Summer Log (The Zone)" is a slow, quiet meditation on the city and the country, encompassing the death of the village and of rural life in Latvia: "In the city my soul runs a chronic high fever and has an irregular pulse," while "in the countryside there is no fear of death." An excerpt from Gundega Repše’s "Stigmata" appears to be a realistic story told through the dialogue of argumentative travellers; it acquires mythological overtones in the course of their journey to what may be the end of the world. God becomes a fellow traveller—the ambivalent and sometimes irrational God of the dainas who is not necessarily in a position to help: "You’re old and tired, Your knees are made of shadows and Your hair is made of twilight, Your chest is the desert and Your genitals have dried up…You tyrant of chaos, You old elephant…"

Dream and reality mix in Aija Lace’s "The Stairs," which recounts how a woman’s refusal, in childhood, to follow a dream leads to its malignant opposite in later life, and perhaps to death. In "Pleasures of the Saints" by Nora Ikstena, the two lovers Theresa and Augustine, two raindrops in a round bed, tell each other their dreams. Martins Zelmenis’ story "Storm Approaching" is a day in the life and also a life in a day; the details of a farm woman’s life fuse with the larger elements of myth and folklore.

"The Flying Fish" by Rimants Ziedonis (son of the poet Imants Ziedonis) is a mischievous skein of literary invention that defies description. At the outer fringe of fantasy, Arvis Kolmanis’ "Veronica, the Schoolgirl" takes place in some future or parallel Latvia where men carry vaguely illicit "motors" in their pockets and women form what seem to be sexual liaisons with white slug-like organisms called "Sophias."

These stories demonstrate a characteristically Latvian love of the unexpected simile, of the metaphor that delights. Among the most artfully deployed are those of Jānis Einfelds, who is a sort of enfant terrible of Latvian letters. His stories—"Cucumber Aria," "The Wonderful Bird," "Fate," "Etude with a Bullet," "Nice Guy Moon" and "Dundega Mornings"—are reminiscent of the blunt grace of Aleksandrs Čaks, their random brutalities overlaying a bitter romance.

To several authors, words themselves have become suspect. Bankovskis alleges that "talking makes no sense anyway; a person can only harm himself by uttering words, because in response he is barraged by a reciprocal flood of words that literally knock him to the ground." Have Latvians found their own words only to abandon them so quickly? Fortunately there seems to be no ebb in the flow of words coming from Latvian writers, and the stories that claim to distrust words are by no means the shortest in this invigorating collection.

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on the SVEIKS.com site.)

“God help you,” her father says, when Ilze Berzins leaves Canada for a new life in Latvia.

She has been raised on her mother’s nostalgic stories of an idyllic rural life in Beki, the farm that was abandoned when her family fled during the Second World War. Berzins was two years old. Now, more than 50 years later, she has come back to test her mother’s dreams. Happy Girl is a memoir of her experiences.

Berzins is determined to make a place for herself. Evicting the drunken louts she finds camped out in her room when she arrives in Rīga, she begins a series of bitter confrontations over housing. Beki, the family homestead, is devastated and unrecognizable after years of Soviet occupation. The tenants there don’t appreciate her sudden appearance. It is clear that their dislike could turn very ugly indeed. Full of energy at the outset, Berzins acquires and loses a series of jobs and apartments in Rīga—and even makes some friends. Eventually, however, the daily struggles of life in Latvia begin to wear on her. Locals are contemptuous of her desire to live there. She is beaten up by a militia man outside her apartment building while neighbours watch; she receives scant attention when she complains to the police. It’s easy, she says, to start drinking in the mornings in Latvia. Alcohol is a necessary cushion between self and reality.

"Kauns! Kauns!" (Shame! Shame!) people yell at her over any misunderstanding and label her "Trakā arzemniece!" (Crazy foreigner) for her eccentricities. Berzins wears leggings, running shoes and baggy sweaters in the street—to the horror of the more formal Latvians. Her colleagues at the Latvian Academy of Art sneer at her methods: she teaches French by singing popular songs, English via "Phantom of the Opera." She refuses to throw her garbage into the trucks like everyone else and leaves it at the curb for someone else to deal with. By her own account, Berzins makes enemies easily. Many of her friendships seem to follow a predictable course of enthusiasm, followed by deterioration, then recrimination.

She is conscious that her expectations are unrealistic: "I just wanted the folks at Beki to disappear. Like they wanted me to disappear. I wanted things to be like they were in my mother’s stories… I wanted impossible things." The myth of Latvia she carries within her is strong. Still, she cannot help but question her mother’s memories of life there: "From early childhood on, we had been brought up on a Latvia that no longer existed, if indeed it ever did exist."

The Latvia she discovers is rife with government and police corruption. Organized crime flourishes. Bribery and sexual harrassment are endemic. The Hare Krishna in Rīga don’t dance or sing in parks; they are too busy feeding the poor who line up outside their temple. Beggars and pensioners hold placards telling of their plight, and the prostitutes on Marijas Street ply their trade with feet wrapped in newspapers. Meanwhile, mafiosi in leather jackets talk on cell phones in expensive restaurants.

"Neņem galvā," the Latvians say. Don’t let it get to you; literally, don’t take it into your head.

Berzins goes to Latvia expecting reunion, completion; instead she encounters incivility, hatred and violence. Nevertheless, she does experience moments of pure joy, usually in the fields of Beki. When she finally gives up her dream of living there and decides to return to Canada, her disappointment and sense of failure drive her to the very edge of herself.

The result of her disillusion is a funny, lively, painful book, somewhat marred by typographical errors and minimal editing. It is a book written in anger. Berzins, along with a whole expatriate generation, was promised a fairytale Latvia that only needed independence to exist again. The promise is still unfulfilled.

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on the SVEIKS.com site.)