54/2020. This is marketed as autobiography but it's partly fiction. The title is based on an imaginative essay the author wrote for a creative writing class in high school, and this does indeed read like a writing exercise for an English as a Foreign Language class (could potentially have been so much better if it was written in the author's native language and translated although I do understand that good translations can be prohibitively expensive). Some of the most important events in recent Latvian history are presented out of order by several years (see the quote by Mark H below for details).

Currently reading my way around the European Union.

Reading: Latvia.

Read: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.

Remaining unread countries: Czechia.

Handy reading guide from an online review by 'Mark H.':

'The book is made up of journal entries from the mid 1980s into the mid 1990s. In the entries we follow the day to day concerns of Iveta as she deals with the same problems teens everywhere deal with: social hierarchies, crushes, trends and clothing, music, privacy or lack thereof, etc. In the background, we also get whiffs of the political and economic changes sweeping through the country: the little rebellions at school and conflicts with the local Russians, the independence movement, the collapse of Soviet-era industry, the influx of American religious cults, etc. The title comes from a story Iveta wrote for a school assignment and an allegory to which she returns repeatedly throughout her journal: Her status as a "white crow," someone who doesn't fit into normal society, a misfit.'

'While the editing of the journal down to 158 entries covering a ten-year period does not detract from the story - indeed it probably makes it readable - it does offer some challenges for those trying to place the events into their exact historical context. The entries are not dated, only numbered. It turns out to be very revealing when an historical calendar is laid over them:

- Entries 30 to 42 seem, during the reading, to recount the events of a single summer, from June through September.

- Enty 44 then mentions February and March which confuses the reader because....

- With entries 46 and 47, we are at the barricades, the "siege of Riga" by the Soviets in January of 1991.

- In entry 50, we are in March of some year, presumably the same year.

The interesting thing here is that this is an editorial "trick". The Helsinki '86 demonstations mentioned in entry 31 took place in the summer of 1987. The meetings at Arkadija park mentioned in entry 37 were in 1988. The Baltic chain mentioned in entry 41 took place in August of 1989. The events of February and March mentioned in entry 44 can be dated in 1990. So what would appear to be the account of a single year is, in fact, a period of five years compacted into one. Throughout that period, however, months mentioned fall in sequence, strenthening the illusion that it is all one calendar year. That, I think, is a legitimate literary device which detracts nothing from the narrative.

It gets confusing, however, when the May 4th declaration of independence is placed after that period, in May of 1992 - a date explicitely mentioned in the text (entry 61). But that historically happened in May of 1990. That could be a misprint, but then it falls out of the chronology, out of the order of the story. It is conceivable that the author is noticing, in 1992, an anniversary of the 1990 event, but it seems unlikely based on her remarks. I suspect this is an example of the editor taking liberties with the order of events.

Sometimes reconstructing the author's age at a particular point in the story is difficult. In the very first entry, she mentions being a teenager. In entry 6, she refers back to a past event when she was "9 or 10." So far so good. But in entry 7 she mentions Andropov as the current Soviet leader, placing this part of the story before March of 1984. Later, we learn that she was one year old in 1978, meaning she was born in 1976 or 1977. So the first entries are not the experiences of a teenager after all, but of an elementary-school-aged girl, possibly as young as six. The editor's introduction makes it clear that the earlier passages were written at least in part after the fact. That might explain the "fuzziness" of chronology and age in the first part of the book." ( )