Dog Park by Sofi Oksanen

Dog Park

by Sofi Oksanen 

translated by Owen F. Witesman

A book review

Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park was originally published in Finnish in 2019 as Koirapuisto and is now being issued in an excellent English translation by Owen F. Witesman.   It is a blistering novel which exposes, through the fictional story of protagonist, the dark underbelly of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

The novel opens in Helsinki in 2016, where we meet Olenka sitting on a bench in a dog park, watching a couple and their two children.  A stranger joins her.  Except she is no stranger, but Daria, a figure from Olenka’s murky past in Ukraine.  In fact, just a few years before, Olenka was not a down-at-heel cleaner eking out a living in a foreign country, but a well-off coordinator in a fertility agency in Ukraine, working at the margins of legality.   Over the course of the novel, we slowly learn the details of a sordid story which has led Olenka’s and Daria’s paths to cross, and which connects the two once-friends to the family they are observing.

Dog Park is a dark and tightly plotted affair, and borrows much from the thriller and the noir, with its backdrop of criminal goings-on, gruesome murders, and corruption at the highest levels.  The novel shows much that is unsavoury about the fertility market, which it presents as exploitative both of its clients and the female donors.  This, however, is presented as part of a wider and more shadowy web of politics, big business and criminality.

Much of the novel’s impact is achieved through Olenka’s first-person narration. The protagonist comes across as an interesting, three-dimensional character.  She is both villain and victim - definitely unlikable, manipulative and unrepentantly Machiavellian in some of her behaviour, but also strangely beguiling. I found myself rooting for her despite her glaring faults. 

Plot-wise Oksanen skilfully keeps her cards close to her chest and reveals the details of her story slowly and tantalizingly.   It is an approach which requires effort on the part of the reader who needs to piece facts together as in a big puzzle.  Yet, despite the complexity of the narrative, Dog Park remains a gripping novel, a searing indictment of the dangers of both oppressive regimes and unbridled capitalism.  Throughout, there is a sense of danger, an edgy feeling of impending tragedy, which fits its subject like a murderer’s glove. 

4 November 2021
Published by Atlantic Books