We had nothing to do with this, which, in a way, makes it even cooler to find it online . . . Apparently this was put together by the fine folks from Books from Lithuania, who have now released

I’m never sure off the effectiveness of these sorts of things, but when I started watching this late Saturday night, I double-checked my door locks when it got to the line: She’s fascinated by the smell of the concentration camp that has permeated his body.

/shiver

Ironically, this Lithuanian novel, which was translated by the award-winning Elizabeth Novickas, was also featured in another video—one that also emphasizes the “Lithanian zombie” aspect, but with a totally different tone:

K.B. The Suspect by Marcelijus Martinaitis. Translated from the Lithuania by Laima Vince. (Lithuania, White Pine Press)

This guest post is by Kevin Prufer, whose newest books are National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008) and Little Paper Sacrifice (Four Way Books, forthcoming). He’s also Editor of New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. We’ll have another post by Kevin tomorrow . . .

Who exactly is K.B. the suspect? Is he a sort of Post-Soviet everyman, wandering the streets of Vilnius, bewildered by the rapidly changing city? Or is he something more sinister, a character who, according Marcelijus Martinaitis, was not a member of the KGB, but could have been, had he been asked? Is he a symbol for all Lithuania, or merely an alter-ego of the poet who created him?

He is, of course, all of these things. In Martinaitis’ brilliant poetic sequence, K.B. emerges as both a distinct personality and a slate on which recent Lithuanian history might be written, interpreted, or erased. “The reader does not know for certain what K.B.’s background is and never finds out,” translator Laima Vince writes. “Similarly, in Lithuania today people do not know about their neighbors’ or colleagues’ pasts, and even if they did, there’s nothing they can do about it.”

But for all these poems’ historical and political ambitiousness, K.B. comes across memorably and vividly, quick to make keenly insightful (and sometimes absurd) observations, a loner perpetually cut off from others, commenting on their actions both nervously and analytically. Often, he addresses the beautiful Margarita, who suggests for him both perfect aesthetic beauty and our human inability to achieve transcendence. (Once, he observes her taking out the trash, making “little noble aristocratic steps” among the dumpsters.) Or he comments on the creeping Western influences of commodification and commercialization, at one point interjecting into his narrative an advertisement for Colgate Toothpaste:

I repeat—
the safest thing of all
is the toothpaste Colgate.

I’d also like to remind you
that by using this toothpaste daily
your teeth will remain healthy
a hundred years after you are gone.

All around him, he senses a sort of amorphous danger—perhaps it is Lithuania’s recent past waiting to re-emerge, perhaps it is only nerves—so K.B. keeps to the shadows, observing, fantasizing, and writing it all down. “My documents,” he tells us,

are in order. I haven’t been tried.
I’m without my gun and almost without any thoughts.

Only parasites, all manner of insects,
flies and worms creep across my face,
crawling into my mouth, my nose,
they suck my blood.

Any direction I turn someone is hiding, fleeing,
staring suspiciously, cowering, collaborating, keeping silent:
I could catch them all, crush them under my feet, end it.

Finally, these complex, paranoid poems create for us a sort of shadow-world of the Post-Soviet Eastern European consciousness, a world brought harrowingly to life through Marcelijus Martinaitis’ startling sense of character and Laima Vince’s fluid, witty, and deeply engaging translation.

by Ricardas Gavelis. Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. (Lithuania, Open Letter)

Vilnius Poker may well be one of the darkest and most dense books on the list. (OK, I know that’s not selling language, but I’m banking on the fact that the blurb below will wow everyone.) Using my insider knowledge, I can tell you that after reading the 20-page sample that Elizabeth Novickas sent us, everyone on the Open Letter editorial committee agreed that we had to publish this book. It’s complicated, occasionally humorous, fragmented, told from several conflicting viewpoints, inconclusive, and considered to be “the turning point in Lithuanian literature.” And more relevant to this award, the translation is spot-on.

The novel itself is set during Soviet times and centers around Vytautas Vargalys, a survivor of the labor camps who’s obsessed with Them, a shadowy group that’s taking over, crushing the souls of people, and turning the world to shit. Lolita—a young woman who just started working with Vytautas at an absurd library—is possibly one of Them, or Vytautas’s great love. As his mind continues to fall apart, their relationship takes a decidedly tragic turn . . .

This isn’t an easy book to describe, but I think translator Elizabeth Novickas does a great job in the essay that appeared in CALQUE:

When asked to come up with a summary of what the book is about, or a single section that could characterize it, I find myself groping at so many things that I’m completely at a loss. Yes, I suppose one could summarize something of the plot: there is a murder, a love story, four narrators, a number of characters, a more or less concrete time frame, and most certainly a concrete place, but how to include that time also goes around in circles, and on two occasions actually stops? And what to do with details of the plot that get told over and over, so that in the end you hardly know which version to believe, much less how to describe it? The best I can come up with, without writing a doctoral thesis on the subject, is also the simplest: this is a piece of fiction about life. The four narrators are all flawed people, but they are all people nevertheless, including the last narrator—the reincarnation of one of the characters as a dog. They make us squirm at their rawness, cringe at the depth of their self-deceptions, laugh at their stories, and in the end, when we see what cards they have been dealt, break our hearts.

Gavelis passed away in 2002, but not before writing a series of interesting books with great titles, such as The Life of Sun-Tzu in the Sacred City of Vilnius, The Last Generation of People on Earth, and Seven Ways to Commit Suicide.

Getting back to Vilnius Poker . . . most reviewers tend to focus on the section fo the book that Vytautas Vargalys narrates. And for good reason: it’s a brilliant, haunting, claustrophobic descent into madness that takes up half of the book. If you want to read a sample, But to shake things up a bit, here’s a quote from the second section, narrated by Martynas Poska, a librarian and academic whose “log” is a bit more upbeat that V.V.‘s ravings, and puts what V.V. conveyed into a new light:

Half the world knows what a homo sovieticus is (excepting homo sovieticus himself). However, no one has studied homo lithuanicus, or even homo Vilnensis. These species matter as much to the future of mankind as to its history.

Mankind should be grateful to the Lithuanians that they exist. But it will never forgive them if they do not describe their experience of existence, if they don’t introduce the entire world to it.

Only a Lithuanian is qualified to write the opus “What is the Ass of the Universe.”

The history of the great nations has been explored backwards and forwards. It’s impossible to learn anything more from them. It’s paradoxical, but humanity knows much more about various archaic tribes than it does about the history of European minorities—that quintessence of injustice, absurdity, and errors. The world may be doomed for the simple reason that no one noticed our plight in time. An ethnologist who diligently researched some Albanians or another would be much more useful than one who had written up hundreds of obscure African tribes.

Never forget that we are all, in a certain sense, a bit Albanian. All of us are just a tad Lithuanian. And worst of all—every one of us, in the depths of our hearts, is a Vytautas Vargalys.

I’m still catching up on Frankfurt stuff (and will be, at least until the next FBF), and just got around to looking at the “Book Publishing in Lithuania” pamphlet I picked up.

The beginnings of Lithuanian history are interesting and troubling. Due to occupations, bans on printing in the Latin alphabet, etc., most Lithuanian books were actually published outside of Lithuania and smuggled in. This was the case for most of the nineteeth-century, then again during the Soviet occupation.

What caught my attention though was this paragraph about publishing in the 1990s:

The publishing needs of the newly formed public structure and the reformed education system steered the publishing business too. Another determining factor was the fact that in the economic crisis, the purchasing of books had become a form of investment of devalued money. Before long, publishing ranked among the most lucrative businesses, with profits reaching 500 per cent. This resulted in an increasing number of publishing companies. For instance, 500 publishing entities, which had produced at least one title, were registered in 1992, whereas the total was merely 71 in 1990.

“Among the most lucrative businesses”? That’s not something you often hear about publishing . . . In fact, there’s that famous old joke: How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune . . .

What’s also interesting—and logical—is the fact that as more titles were produced, the average number of copies per title declined rapidly. In 1991, 2,482 titles were published, with an average of 13,935 copies per title (which is pretty large, even by American standards). In 1998, the total number of titles had jumped to 4,109, but the average number of copies had fallen to 3,269. (In other words, total output in 1998 was about 40% of what it had been in 1991.)

Nowadays, the average edition is 1,808 copies, and “if 4,000 copies are sold in two months, the book is hailed a bestseller.” And publishing, unfortunately, isn’t as lucrative as it once was.

Most publishing companies now run bookstore chains though (which happened here long ago, but no longer) and the average book costs 10 Euros (around $15).

Here’s some other fun things:

Publishers started a lottery practice in the distribution of books. For instance, in the Big Game by Alma Littera and Reader’s Digest one can win 100,000 litas by purchasing books in a certain order. [. . .]

On average, a single publishing company publishes eight titles a year. [. . .] Two major companies, Sviesa and Alma Littera, which merged in 2002, today produce nearly 20 per cent of Lithuania’s overall annual book output.

And in contrast to the famous 3% number, in Lithuania, 33.3% of all titles publisher are in translation.

John Freeman will cringe if he sees this:

A small circulation of cultural publications does no favour to book promotion. Notwithstanding some initiatives to promote literature, daily papers don’t devote as much attention to books as their foreign counterparts, nor do they employ regular book reviewers, who could make an impact on the choice of books.

And finally, in terms of general funding:

For a long time, the Open Society (Soros) Fund Lithuania was one of the major supporters of publishing in the country; however, it is about to terminate its publishing programme.