Soviet Milk is narrated alternately by an unnamed mother and daughter, spanning the years 1969 to 1989 in Soviet-occupied Latvia. The mother, a gifted gynaecologist, has her promising career destroyed by a single act of resistance and is banished to a rural clinic, where she and her young daughter struggle to build a life together under the suffocating weight of a system designed to grind them down.
My Review
At first glance this is a troubled mother-daughter story set in Soviet Latvia. Look a little closer and it becomes something more layered: a chronicle of three generations of women, of what a grandmother can give a granddaughter when the mother between them cannot, of a small country’s long hunger for a self it is not permitted to have.
The novel alternates between the voices of an unnamed mother and her daughter, spanning 1969 to 1989. The mother is a gifted doctor whose career is derailed by a single act of rebellion and who finds herself exiled to a rural clinic, slowly withdrawing from the world around her. The daughter grows up absorbing the limitations of what can be said, known, or admitted in a society built on enforced forgetting. Their fractured relationship maps, almost exactly, onto Latvia’s own fractured history under Soviet rule.
Ikstena fills the prose with symbols and metaphors for repression, the caged hamster, the toxic milk of the title, the dog-eared copy of 1984 the mother reads obsessively. When it works, it is quietly devastating. When it accumulates, it tips into the heavy-handed, and there were moments where I felt the symbolism was doing the work the narrative should have been doing instead. The alternating voices, too, are not always clearly enough differentiated, and the transitions between them can jar.
The novel also left me genuinely uncertain about one of its central questions: how much of the mother’s decline is the product of Soviet oppression, and how much belongs to her own interior demons? That ambiguity is interesting in theory, but the book doesn’t quite seem to know which answer it believes either, and that murkiness accumulates.
Still, there is enough here that is gripping and genuinely unusual, particularly as a perspective on Latvian history rarely seen in translation, to make it absolutely worth reading.