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Vilnius Poker (1989)

by Ričardas Gavelis(Favorite Author)

4.28 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1934824054 (ISBN13: 9781934824054)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Open Letter

review 1: four narrators (one of them is a dog, cool) and cold and gray and bleak. prose teeters on that feeling where you aren't sure if you are going to puke or not but you keep swaing back and forth over the toilet, oh my god you want to die so bad. read this book and then when you die and come back you can read it again-- The live skeleton crawls on all fours through the pen and nibbles at the grass. The skeleton of a tall man with a toothless mouth and bloody gums rips out a dried-up clump and slowly chews it. There is nothing left in his eyes; Plato and Einstein are dead, Nietzsche and Shakespeare are dead. And I went to the shed; it remained a sacred place to the very end. There Jane took away my virginity. There, four years later, the Russian soldiers raped her. There ... moremy mother hung herself. There, in the summer of nineteen-forty, my grandfather built his altar of horror. Between the legs, almost from the knees up, sprout fat globs of flesh - something like thick ropes. They rise right up to the hair below her belly; it seems that they twist themselves straight into that woman's innards and pierce her through. Under that woman's arms upright globules of fat converge. Coarse tufts of hair curl on her nipples and even between her breasts. I see only the threatening parody of a body; the separate parts don't suit one another - it seems she could crack apart at any moment, disassemble like a matrioshka doll. ... All the warlocks used to eat the brains of aurochs... Vilnius is a city of identical little cement boxes. A city of identical little clay figures. A city of identical tears and identical sperm. If some giant were to suddenly mix everything up completely, all the houses, the people, the tears, and the sperm, if he were to switch everything's place and muddle it all up, absolutely nothing would change. "I feel like King Lear," VV repeated grimly. What could I say to King Lear? That he should down his cocktails with more restraint, because we'll be out of money in a minute? That he's no king, he's called Vyautas Vargalys, and he doesn't have any daughters? It's horrifying when a person merges with the sullied, stinking walls and becomes a nameless detail of the Ass of the Universe. But it's even more horrifying when an inhabitant of the Ass of the Universe drowns in cosmic visions. I listened to Giedraitiene's tale until nearly dawn. The names of the rabbits got all confused; there were too many of them. Robespierre or Freud didn't surprise me, but I was shocked by Mozart, Camus, and Beethoven. Beethoven was a large female with floppy ears who could tap the floor of its cage to the rhythm of the Fifth Symphony. Every week, VV would knock off some Kant, Picasso, or Confucius. Note: G__ related the following words of VV's to me, stated as he knocked off yet another rabbit: "Unfortunately, they'll all be born again. killing makes no sense at all... Unless you'd murder someone in the firm believe that by dying a martyr's death, he'll be reborn into a better world, or a better age." I'm going to get drunk. After two shots: it's still the same. After four shots: it's absolutely the same. People can't smell like dogs do, otherwise the world would fall apart. The world is the way it is only because the greater part of people's thoughts and intentions are unknown and unpredictable to other people. But we, as dogs, can smell all of that. Even the most ordinary mutt smells what his master wants before he even wishes for it himself. The semiotics of scent could be the most profound knowledge in the world. My thoughts are getting more and more dog-like. This thought broke out of my howling brain as a black luminary, as an explanation and an answer, even thought I don't know what it means, and now I'll never find out: DOGS DON'T DISTINGUISH DREAMS FROM REALITY.
review 2: I was afraid I'd have to like this because it was from Lithuania. I'd plow my way through, then give it five stars just because it's Baltic literature. But, hang on, what's this? - it's excellent. And cryptic. And surreal. Elements of Kafka, Joyce, and Pelevin. At times it felt excessively philosophical for my tastes, but if you're going to be the one book in English to represent Lithuanian literary culture (so far?), you want to be a bit philosophical. This was one of those books that required a little more effort from me, a bit more concentration, but for which the reward was worth it.(Now, let's find the Latvian book that will do its country's literary culture this much justice.) less

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