Vilnius Poker is probably the most difficult book I’ve read in years. Most of the books I’ve read are plot or character driven. Some use setting very adroitly, as does Gavelis’ book. While setting, Vilnius specifically, is integral to the work, mood seems to drive the work more than anything else. The prose reads very dream-like. I don’t mean ethereal. Scenes and situations and times blend from one to another.
Told in four parts ever decreasing in size, the first from the perspective of Vytautas Vargalis. As the later parts describe, everyone recognizes Vytautas greatness. But his narrated section reads more like madness. It was the hardest to follow. For instance, Vytautas Vargalys has a conversation with his deceased father followed by his friend Gediminas Riauba gathering together musicians to play a concert in an abandoned cathedral for Vytautas sole benefit. The transitions are smooth. I often had to re-read portions to see how one scene grew from another.
The Kirkus Reviews blurb on the back cover calls this The Matrix behind the Iron Curtain. I think that description does the book a disservice, for The Matrix was very clear as to what was “real” and what was generated. Or at least that there was a reality and a veneer. Vilnius Poker does not make things so clear. While it’s obvious that Vytautas does not exist in the humdrum world, I’m not so certain that reality is important. Gavelis’ story isn’t so much about peeling back the layers as it is about blending them to set a mood.
Central to the story is Vilnius, Lithuania, and the people of Lithuania. Vytautas sees the hand of Them everywhere. They rob Lithuania of a vital essence, but it doesn’t seem like Gavelis is certain that its people had much to start with. Vytautis muses constantly about why They are present in Lithuania to begin with. He seems quite bitter at a lost greatness, or at least the lost possibility of greatness.
The story
, what I can make of it, is a big complicated affair. I don’t mean lots of intricate plot turns. Affairs of the kind that married people have with each other. In this case, the men chase after Lolita Banye-Žilienė, a beautiful vain girl. Having never read Nabokov’s work, I can’t say how Lolita compares to her obvious namesake. She certainly doesn’t represent youth and vitality here! Nothing good comes from bedding her.
The shorter parts that follow Vytautas’ are much easier to follow. Each subsequent narrator described the same events from their perspective. Not that they are always recognizable as the same events. Everything becomes subject to ones own demons that haunt them. But all of them give a different, none positive, take on what it is to be Vilniutian and Lithuanian. The word despair
comes to mind whenever one of them gets to a monologue about Vilnius.
So to sum up: Vilnius, Lithuania, madness, despair. Too much stuff for me to wrap my head around.
One last thing though. It’s not all deep muddled thinking. Gavelis (or perhaps his translater Elizabeth Novickas) certainly has a flair for language and for a subtle wry kind of humor. I bookmarked dozens of pithy writings that resonated with me: the fundamental question of philosophy: do you kill someone else, or yourself?
or The Buddhist theory of inescapable pain doesn’t explain anything, it’s merely an observation.
Depressingly funny.
Open Letter Books provided this review copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for a review of 25 words length or more to be posted on LibraryThing.
Other blogged reviews
Title: Vilnius Poker
Author: Ričardas Gavelis
Translator: Elizabeth Novickas (from the Lithuanian)
Imprint / publisher: Open Letter Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 485 p.
Publication date: January 2009 (originally 1991)
ISBN-10: 1-934824-05-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-05-4
Subject: Libraries — Lithuania — Fiction
Subject: Man-woman relationships — Lithuania — Fiction
Subject: Lithuania — Fiction
LC classification: PG8722.17.A84 V5513 2009
