The novel “Flying on the Spot” (1998) by the outstanding Estonian writer, Nobel Prize nominee Jaan Kross, received enormous recognition from the Estonian public. Looming magazine editor-in-chief Udo Uibo writes in his review: “It’s not very often that writers on the threshold of their 80th birthday create the best works of their lives.” The novel represents the common denominator of the fate of the main character Ulo Paerand and the fate of his native country. Flying in Place is a gripping story told with exceptional skill. This is a depiction of the people's recent past, replete with vivid details. At the end of 1999, the novel was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature. Literary critic Toomas Haug said at the award ceremony that the novel sums up the life of the Estonian people in the past century and called J. Cross “the Estonian national medium.” Cross is an analytical writer, with a great taste for historical details and hidden psychology, “slow” - and it is also worth reading him slowly, carefully delving into the details of the long and outwardly “erased” life of the main character, the Estonian intellectual Ullo Paerand, who served as an official during the years of independence under the government, and under the Soviet regime - as a warehouse manager at a suitcase factory. In the leisurely pace, hidden humor, the dotted movement of the author’s favorite thoughts (about the price of human independence, about order and disorder, about the power of any “system”), all the charm of this prose