I Am Not Afraid of Bluebeard

Sana Valiulina was born in Tallinn in 1964, graduated from Moscow State University, and has been living in Amsterdam since 1989. She is the author of books in Dutch, including the autobiographical novel Cross 2000, the collection of stories Nowhere with Love, the novel Didar and Faruk 2006, which was nominated for the Libris Literary Award and translated into German, and the novel One Hundred Years of Comfort 2009. The new novel I Am Not Afraid of Bluebeard 2015 was written simultaneously in Dutch and Russian. The essay collection Winter Rains, released in 2016, was awarded the prestigious Jan Hanlo Essay Prize. The novel I Am Not Afraid of Bluebeard is about the generation of Brezhnev's children, whose childhood and coming of age occurred during the era of stagnation, consisting of four spaces and four times. From the nostalgically-watercolor village of Rucha on the Estonian coast in the 1970s, where silence prevails, only the pines hum above the boulders like antennas: the sea broadcasts, with a mysterious house where mysterious events take place, through Tallinn at the turn of the 1970s-1980s and the hidden cruelty of the Soviet school, and Tallinn in the early 1990s, at the dawn of wild capitalism, with brutalities that are open and unmasked, to our time, a non-existent country and an era-without-changes.