ABSTRACT
Diego Marani imagines an ur-language for Finnish and the other Uralic tongues which spread along the northern rim of Eurasia from Finland to the Laptev Sea. Diego Marani works in the Directorate-General for Interpretation at the European Commission, and he writes fiction full of ideas prompted by his day job. The Last of the Vostyachs, Marani's book to be translated into English, is not as fantastical as L'Interprete, or as melancholy as New Finnish Grammar. The myth of linguistic origin blurrily put forth by Pastor Koskela is taken to be true. Marani draws on a history of serious speculation about the language of Eden and its possible avatars in fallen nature. In The Last of the Vostyachs, Olga Pavlovna is Russian and Jaarmo Aurtova is Finnish. Dante Alighieri probably looms largest, and of course he too found a way through a dark forest to another world.
