Diego Marani continues his engagement with the Finnish language with The Last of the Vostyachs. At the start of the novel, Ivan walks free from a Soviet labor camp and heads into the tundra to live on his own. Ivan hasn't spoken for years, because he is the last living speaker of Vostyach, a proto-language long thought lost to the world. When he comes into a little town to sell some skins he meets a Russian linguist, and she prevails on him to come with her to Helsinki for her to show off at a language conference.

From there Marani takes his story into a really trite and silly direction where the last of the Vostyachs becomes the centre of a passionate and arcane academic dispute over the origins of the Finnish language. The book is full of linguistic jargon and has some of the worst sex scenes you may ever read. A tiresome and silly book, all the more disappointing because the book's opening premise could have been developed into a much more interesting and moving story. This is a good idea totally wasted. ( )

Ivan and his father are members of an isolated tribe of nomadic hunter gatherers in Siberia and are imprisoned by the Soviets for the crime of 'poaching'. Ivan's father does not survive but when the guards abandon the prison camp on the fall of the Soviet Union, Ivan tries to find his people. Speaking a hitherto unknown Finno-Ugric language, he is befriended by a Russian linguist/anthropologist who sends him to a linguistics conference in Helsinki, much to the displeasure of the Finnish Professor Jaarmo Aurtova.

Another interesting reflection on language and identity from Diego Marani in the form of a thriller - will the mad, bad professor get away the evil plan? I really enjoyed it, though I did wonder throughout whether a coupe de glotte is what I know as a glottal stop. Wikipedia says it's a musical term. A mistranslation or is the confusion there in the Italian? ( )

Fascinating how an Italian linguist can turn the obscurities of Finno Ugric languages into an imagined tale of the spiritualism of nature set into a weakly plotted crime thriller. What is it about Finland that so captures the attention of the author? Facing the challenge of the language may have driven him to a state of ecstasy. Who knows. ( )

Last of the Voystachs held my attention, was occasionally touching, and passages and strands in it might prove memorable. But like another member I wish Marani had written another draft before publishing, one in which he'd managed to achieve consistency of tone or, better still, harmony of tones. It wouldn't be impossible for a writer so good as he to mix humour with pathos, the absurd with the weighty, and violence with nostalgic yearning; here, though, those elements were irregular pieces of patchwork rather than coherent whole. And because they were they competed with, even undermined, each other: The compassion Marani makes the reader feel for Ivan is lessened by the attention given the sit-com ex-wife; the wonderful descriptions of nature and weather are weakened by the account of the Laplander's anxious drive to the beach; the thoughtful passages about linguistics seem less thoughtful followed as they are by a character's attempt to get drunk a woman with a hollow leg. Moreover, changes in viewpoint sometimes also have this patchy quality: the account of two professors meeting in a summer cottage, for example, is often awkward because Marani shifts point of view without making clear enough whose viewpoint is being given.

I think this book might have a special appeal to British readers because like many comic British novels it has a far-fetched, very plotty, terribly broad treatment of the humourous. But there's much more to it than the farcical and on the whole I'd recommend it: It's a quite good novel that could with more care and better balance have been a good one.

Clever, somewhat humorous story about the preservation of language and its implication for culture. For my full review please see Whispering Gums at: http://whisperinggums.com/2013/11/29/diego-marani-the-last-of-the-vostyachs-revi... ( )