Mehis Heinsaar (born 1973) is one of the rising stars of new Estonian literature. Originally aspiring to become a long-distance runner, he soon moved on to writing short stories for which he has already received several prestigious awards: already twice the Tuglas Award as well as the Betti Alver award for a debut work of the year 2001.
Although Mehis Heinsaar has only published two collections of short-stories, he has enjoyed unprecedented success amongst critics and has been awarded several prizes. Heinsaar is a self-ironic “traveller in rooms”, a suburban bohemian, whose ideal, according to his own admission is a normal middle-class existence following the principle of "seeing the world through the eyes of someone living his first day there".
The most striking feature of Heinsaar's work is when everyday life rubs up against myth and unusual occurrences in familiar settings. Miracles are quite commonplace in Heinsaar's prose. He provides the reader with details, but not in excess, he is succinct in his use of language and his stories are light and airy, with the imaginary dimension introduced in realistic scenes, sometimes in an absurd or surrealistic way. For example: a butterfly man doing tricks at the circus vanishes and turns into a caterpillar; when a flat door is opened there is a hilly ridge filled with old men playing there, and so on. At times, reality is shot through with streaks of the unconscious, yet the texts are clear and have an ironic dimension to them. The settings can be just about anywhere and sometimes the stories have an intertextual reference. The cat, lapping up wine and dictating a story in the story "Oliver Helves' Tale" (Oliver Helvese lugu, 2001) is likely to be a relation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's cat Murri. And the story "Encounter in Time" (Kohtumine ajas, 2001) which is gaily hallucinatory and in which a smelly old man rapes a girl on a park bench, deluding himself that this is his childhood love has the ring of "Lolita" about it. The critics claim that Heinsaar has been inspired by, among other things, the Old Testament and a number of Bulgakov's magical realist tales.
In Heinsaar's book "The Chronicles of Mr Paul" (Härra Pauli kroonikad, 2001) there are also unreal occurrences in everyday settings at the interface between ordinary time and space, but which obey hitherto unknown rules of physical dimension. At the Academy of the Unknowing, run by Mr Paul, whose main building, lecture theatres and students consist of him himself, research is done into the mysteries of material. Heinsaar's work also tends to contain a respect for life of the kind found with Albert Schweitzer.