"Life in Vilnius is a giant poker game, played by madmen."

Then how can you explain humanity's structure, all the world's societies, all human communities, their aspirations and modes of existence? How can you explain that always and everywhere, as far as you can see, one idiot rules a thousand intelligent people, and they quietly obey? Whence comes the silent gray majority in every society? Would a person who wasn't kanuked think of vegetating in a soulless condition and say that's the way everything should be?

I am horribly late! The Wolves' discussion of Vilnius Poker, written by Ričardas Gavelis and translated from Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas, was to take place last Friday. But Thanksgiving, travel, and work all conspired to mess up my reading. The good thing about being late, though, is that this post is kind of like a TV Clip Show. The other Wolves have already covered this particular novel and said many of the things I wanted to say as well. Emily, for example, discusses the first section's "circular narrative" and how its repetition and use of recurring elements (i.e. dogs, cockroaches, scatological imagery, monstrous genitalia) take the form of a textual fugue. Both Isabella and I enjoyed the wild dream sequences and "lovely, crazy passages," although she ultimately disliked the book and gave up. And all four of us (including Sarah) were struck by the disturbing treatment of women, even after it became clear that the bulk of it was the product of the protagonist's diseased mind.

The character in question is one Vytautas Vargalys, a survivor of the Soviet gulags under Stalin. It is now the 1970s, and he has returned to his native Lithuania to work in capital city Vilnius as a librarian. It's an absurd position - he has been tasked with creating a digital catalog that he can't actually finish until the big library in Leningrad finishes their catalog. As his colleague, disgraced educator Martynas explains, it's more like they're collecting unemployment for being employed. The rest of the group under Vargalys's supervision is a quartet of women, including Stefa, who always seems to be underfoot, and gorgeous Lolita. So far so good.

Except that Vargalys is completely out of his mind, suffering from a combination of PTSD and raging paranoia. Demon shadow-people are taking over the world! He spends his days searching for evidence of Their existence in the books of his library, many of them banned from public view. Though he appears functional to others, he is completely consumed by nightmarish hallucinations and a never-ending loop of bizarre, obsessive delusions. (Sarah puts it very well: "The events of a single day and of Vargalys’ entire life are conveyed by him in a looping, seeming chaos. . . Vargalys zooms in and out repeatedly while maintaining a dizzying clarity.") They are dead-eyed imposters who proliferate by seizing the minds and bodies of healthy, thinking humans and turning them into mindless freaks. They will "kanuk" you - turn you into one of Them. They are legion and they will destroy anyone who even suspects of their existence.

Clearly this is in fact a madman's attempt to come to terms with life under a communist dictatorship - particularly one that came in from the outside (Russia). Vilnius Poker is also an enraged tirade against the oppression of the Lithuanian national spirit and the loss of its free heritage under Polish and then Soviet rule. Vilnius, apparently, is the Asshole of the Universe. Gediminas Tower, the symbol of Lithuania itself, is likened in Vargalys's mind to a impotent member. The very atmosphere is bleak and hopeless when not twisting in on itself like a series of funhouse mirrors - at one point, for example, Vargalys imagines himself trapped in an impossible maze of dingy corridors after pursuing his missing father like Alice's white rabbit. Kirkus Reviews compared Vilnius Poker to The Matrix and it's easy to see why. The real world as we know it is a facade for something deeper and darker - perhaps a reflection of communism's relentless emphasis on total equality and the destructive measures most regimes have taken ostensibly to achieve that equality (i.e. gulags, the Ukrainian famine). North Korea seems to have this down pat.

Out of our group, both Richard and Isabella gave up (Richard didn't even post) and Sarah came close. I don't blame them. Gavelis's prose is brilliant and vivid but there are still the issues of 1) the narrative repetition, 2) the constant shit/genitalia imagery and 3) Vargalys's disgusting views of women and sexuality. The last two derive from Vargalys having spent his formative years in a hellish, all-male labor camp, and No. 2 is more eye-rolling than anything else. But in the latter's case . . . to begin with, I'm going to give a trigger warning to anyone interested in reading Vilnius Poker. There are at least two rape scenes in Vargalys's section and other scenes that come close. The rapes seem to have taken place entirely in his head but that doesn't make them any less difficult to get through. Vargalys's perception of women is generally demeaning and constantly narrows down to breasts and vaginas.

In Vargalys's mind, the transformation from human to "kanuk" is physical as well as psychological. This causes his POV to swing between either worshiping women's bodies or reviling them. His suspicion that ex-wife Irena - previously his life-saving Madonna - has been kanuked is fueled in part by what seems to be the natural aging process: her skin loses its youthful luster and she has gained weight. His subsequent disgust is violent: "That woman's breasts are swollen, three hideous rolls lie pressed together. . . The waist has disappeared somewhere; square thighs stick out immediately below the bulging breasts. Between the legs, almost from the knees up, spout fat globs of flesh - something like thick ropes." The image of the older woman's body is further juxtaposed against references to degraded sexuality, sour and moldy smells, and disease.

And yet later, during his involvement with Lolita: "I'm amazed that Solomon attempted to compare his loved one's body to something. Lolita isn't comparable to anything; she's not even comparable with herself, because she is different every time. She is like an entire world, like a universe - with stars, nebulae, and comets. Her flavor is heavenly. . ." (And on and on for two whole pages.) What this reminded me of, very eerily, was a Dutch novel by Ilja Leornard Pfeijffer I reviewed awhile back called Rupert: A Confession, about a pathological rapist who waxes poetic for pages and pages about his beautiful Mira, the "fact that makes fiction possible." Overall, the impression I get from both Rupert (who made my recent Top 10 Villains list, BTW) and Vargalys is of men only capable of perceiving women as either sex objects or rejected sex objects. And even the former are venerated as symbols rather than real human beings (in that same passage, Vargalys finds himself unable to look at Lolita's face and starts seeing her as some kind of "universal woman"). It is also worth noting that both Rupert and Vargalys's stories end with a brutal act of male-on-female violence.

Until Martynas's section 300 pages later I was unsure if this misogyny was simply the characterization of a depraved mind or if at least some of it was Gavelis's Henry Miller-esque bias showing. Martynas is generally sympathetic to the plight of the female characters, although I also felt, as Emily did, that Stefa's chapter was very "derivative" when compared to the three male narrations - one of whom had been reincarnated as a dog! Stefa had this stream-of-conscious style going on that also lacked the social/philosophical insight of the rest of the book - as though she was more instinctive and less analytical than the men. On the one hand, it's great that at least Gavelis gave her a voice. But it's still a very "othered" voice that ends with a gang rape that added nothing to the story. Why was that even there? (Again, trigger warning.)

So at this point we're down to the Big Question. Did I like Vilnius Poker? It certainly wasn't my favorite but I did enjoy most of it. As I mentioned earlier, Ričardas Gavelis's prose is excellent and I did enjoy reading it. But Vilnius Poker is also a polarizing book, even to a single reader. Once again, I really don't blame anyone who abandons this one and there are definitely many reasons why that would happen. Although I chose to focus on gender with this post, there is a lot more happening here and I strongly recommend checking out what my compatriots have written.

See also: my reviews of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain and The Judgment Day Archives.

It occurs to me that every book I have read and blogged about lately has been either really depressing, published by Open Letter Press, or both. I promise that the book I am reading now is neither.

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Ričardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker was The Wolves' reading selection for the month of November. Please feel free to join us at any time! You can find a complete book list here.

Past selections:

March: Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
April: Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
May: Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
June: Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak
July: Kenzaburo Ōe, A Personal Matter Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
August: William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
September: Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita
October: Tobias Wolff, Old School

Chopped Down

Tonight my book club met with a professor of Russian literature from a local college to discuss Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, which he completed on his deathbed in 1902. He did not live to see its 1904 premiere, directed by Constantin Stanislavski, who insisted that what Chekhov intended to be a comedy was actually a tragedy.

The plot is very simple: Lyúba is the aristocratic landowner of a large estate that includes what was once a world-renown cherry orchard. She has returned with her daughter Ánya from an extended trip abroad to increasing financial difficulty at home. Lopákhin, a wealthy businessman whose father was one of Lyúba's family's serfs, insists that she sell the estate to him so that he can demolish the cherry orchard and parcel the land into sites for the summer homes of the nouveau riche. The play also includes Lyúba's brother Gáev, her foster daughter Várya, Pétya the eternal student, Sharlótta the governess, Yepikhódov the family clerk, the maid Dunyásha, the servant Yásha who accompanied Lyúba on her travels, and Firs, an 87-year-old servant who is the oldest member of the household.

The Cherry Orchard is centered on the interaction between each of the characters and between the characters and their historical context. Czar Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Manifesto in 1861 that freed the serfs and, in the process, gradually deprived the grand estates of their cheap workforce. It was a necessary measure, however, as Russia's sorry performance in the Crimean War had made it clear that Europe's remaining feudal state needed serious reform. By Chekhov's time, the late nineteenth century, the ramifications of this measure were still being felt, as seen in the entropic atmosphere of The Cherry Orchard. An old system of stability is beginning to disintegrate into uncertainty or even chaos. The social strata is collapsing in on itself as the wealthy serfs buy their masters' land and servants like Yásha crave the trappings of status. Where they are headed, no one is certain. Pétya makes a big show of being a radical firebrand but even he is apprehensive about the possible consequences of his proto-Bolshevik ideas.

Chekhov himself, of course, was the grandson of a former serf. But despite his own deep connections to the events forming the historical basis of The Cherry Orchard, he is not entirely unsympathetic to Lyúba and Gáev. Free-spending, sexually amoral Lyúba can certainly be seen as the prototype of the decadent aristocrat but Gáev seems to recall the one positive virtue of nobility that an artist like Chekhov could appreciate. Reflecting on a bookcase that has been in the family for over a century, Gáev says:

Yes ... Quite a thing ... (He runs his hand over it.) Most honorable bookcase! Allow me to salute you for more than a hundred years of service to the glorious principles of virtue and justice. Not once in an entire century has your silent summons to productive labor faltered. (Through tears.) From generation to generation you have maintained our family's courage and faith in a better future, you have nurtured in us the ideals of goodness and social consciousness.

Whereas Pétya spouts rhetoric about "suffering and relentless hard work" bringing Russian into the modern age and Lopákhin brags about waking at four in the morning and laboring with money til night, Gáev hearkens back to the elite virtues of elegance and refinement. His occasional rhapsodies on the the beauty and value of nature and old furniture, though moving and lyrical, stand in almost pitiful contrast to the idealistic utilitarianism espoused by Pétya and, to a lesser extent, Lopákhin, who admits that reading a book only put him to sleep.

Gáev's speeches are not only irrelevant but also a source of embarrassment to the younger characters, who constantly try to shut him up. The anxiety at work on the national scale in The Cherry Orchard is expressed on a more intimate level through the relationships between individuals. No one listens to anyone else and what is expected, such as the prospective marriage between Várya and Lopákhin, never happens.

SHÁRLOTTA (pensively). I have no real identity papers, no way of knowing how old I am, but I always think of myself as young. When I was a little girl, my mother and father toured the fairgrounds giving performances, good ones too. I did the salto mortale and various other stunts. And when Mama and Papa died, a German lady saw to my education. So far, so good. Then I grew up and took a post as a governess. But don't ask me where I'm from or who I am - I don't know ... Don't ask me who my parents were or even if they were married - I don't know. (She takes a small cucumber out of her pocket and bites into it.) Don't know a thing.

(Pause)
I want so much to talk to somebody. But who? ... I'm all alone.

YEPIKHÓDOV. (playing the guitar and singing)

What care I for worldly pleasure.
What care I for friend or foe...
I do so enjoy playing the mandolin!

SHÁRLOTTA. That's no mandolin; that's a guitar. (She gazes at herself in a hand mirror and powders her face.)

YEPIKHÓDOV. To a fool in love it's a mandolin...

We then have Yásha and Yepikhódov discussing the trip abroad, and then Yepikhódov boldly declaring himself to be a "man of culture" and ending his lines with "I always carry a revolver with me." The impression is of people who cannot connect or find a common ground and whose conversation is disjointed and unorganized. They are like elements that cannot coalesce or coherently arrange themselves.

Though never appearing literally, death - the inevitable result of decay and decline - has a strong symbolic presence. Firs, age 87, remembers when "we had generals and barons and admirals at our parties," whereas now Lyúba and Gáev can only beg for the postmaster and stationmaster. He recalls the fame of the cherry orchard and the high prices its produce once fetched in Moscow. "Peasants had their masters; masters had their peasants," he says. "Now they're all scattered. You don't know where you stand." But Firs is even more archaic than Gáev's speeches. At the end of the play, everyone insists he was taken to the hospital, but Firs has actually been forgotten (which he realizes) and left locked in the empty house. He goes over to the couch and lies there motionless as the curtain descends.

What happened to everyone else? We know that Lopákhin has bought the estate, Várya is going to be a housekeeper, and Gáev has accepted a post at the bank which Lyúba insisted he decline. But will they adapt? What will become of their lives in the new era?

What's next?

Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy. - Roberto Bolaño

Kafka on the Wall

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain
Various Authors
Various Translators
Open Letter Press
Words Without Borders
231 pages
November 30, 2009


Communist dictatorship . . . had its own rationality and motives, its own aims and purposes, except that these had nothing in common with normalcy, logic as we know it, or everyday life. (Judith Sollosy, "Reflections on Péter Esterházy's Revised Edition")

The Wall in My Head is an anthology of essays, poetry, short stories, images and historical documents from former citizens of the Soviet bloc, all relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of Soviet Communism. The release of both The Wall in My Head and Season of Ash, also from Open Letter Press, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of these historic events, and also, as Keith Gessen notes in his introduction, seeks to capture the tumultuous, upturned atmosphere of post-Communism, an era recently ended. "You can tell it's over because nobody wants to hear anymore about how terrible Communism was. Russians sure don't, and not just because Communism was all their fault." Like Season of Ash, The Wall in My Head depicts very recent history which nevertheless already feels distant, thanks to the radical changes that occurred in Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s.

The writers featured in the anthology, though they come from different national, cultural, and ethnic perspectives, share many common experiences. But what I focused on the most as I read through book was the theme set up by the opening piece, a selection from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Kundera argues that life under Communism resembled a Kafka story, in which hapless humans are caught up in the mechanisms of a towering bureaucracy that operates under its own incomprehensible laws of unknown origin. Thus, a file buried in an office somewhere, Kundera explains, "takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast upon the screen of illusion." Land-Surveyor K. from Kafka's novel The Castle, for instance, exists only because of an obsolete, mistakenly-filed order; indeed, Kundera goes on, K. is actually the shadow of an error in the file, and therefore has no right to exist even as a shadow.

K.'s absurd situation is highly comparable to the protagonist of the allegedly true story of an engineer in Communist Prague, who is reported as having made a slanderous remark about Czechoslovakia while in London and having further stated a desire to remain in the West. No one seems willing or able to retract the false report and the poor engineer is continuously referred to one department after another. The engineer then starts to wonder if his phones are being tapped and starts to fear for his safety until he finally can't take it anymore and actually does flee the country.

But while the engineer's tale may or may not be an urban legend - a bit of sensationalized modern folklore whose seeming veracity arises from shared societal fears and anxieties - many of the collected works of The Wall in My Head deal, each in their own way, with the institutionalized irrationalities of life under Communism. Beginning with Communism's basic premise: that it represents an evolutionary endpoint, the Utopian culmination of centuries of the worker's struggle for a just society. And so, as Rousseau once put it, the oppressed proletariat must be "forced to be free." In "The Road to Bornholm," German poet Durs Grünbein describes East Berlin's atmosphere leading to the fall of the Wall:

The reason for the upsurge was a bundle of unsolvable contradictions, from the miserable future prospects for most citizens (despite their undiminished historical mission), to the stagnation of an entire society (which knew progress only as an ideology) due to the erosion of all their members' self-confidence (lauded as the development of a mature socialist personality), down to lifelong imprisonment (in order to protect the people from themselves and their misguided wants). . .

. . . The sickness hidden behind it [the Wall], a deep identity crisis, was initially masked and later, denied. Since that time, a deceptively schizoid jargon, DDR language, had been escaping through the cracks in their rigid, inbred logic. The Soviet idea was so attractive that only prison architecture could preserve it. One day Rufus stumbed on two lines by Robert Frost, which to him summed up the whole paradox of the Wall in a nutshell: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out . . .

Most organized societies, of course, have their own incongruities and aspects that seem to deviate from common sense. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is a brilliant exploration of this; Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night is another. But Vonnegut and Heller were obviously writing hyperbolic satire, whereas The Wall in My Head is equal parts realism (in the fictionalized pieces) and historical documentary. Absurdity stands out even more.

In a selection from his novel Imperium, we learn from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (with some exaggeration, naturally) that the Soviet Union was so obsessed with marking its borders that factories seemed to manufacture nothing but reams and reams of barbed wire, which deteriorated quickly under the elements and was in perpetual need of replacement. As such, it was virtually impossible to find in a Soviet shop any useful metal item such as a hoe, hammer, or eating utensil. And that's not even taking into account the logistics required in constructing and maintaining these barbed wire fences, from telephone calls and telegrams, to the orders constantly coming in, to the transportation of said wire, the bureaucracy involved, and the consequent neglect of other areas of Soviet infrastructure.

Though not everything that stood out to me was literally Kafkaesque, the very dissonance often felt closely related. East German activist Peter Schneider, in his novel The Wall Jumper, tells of the family of an influential Berlin Party member who were allowed to maintain their living conditions when the Wall was built. So the otherwise straight, monolithic Wall made a sudden zigzag around their house but abutted it so closely that the children were able to jump over and enter West Berlin whenever they pleased. In "My Grandmother the Censor" Marsha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and novelist, interviews her grandmother about her post-WWII job at the Soviet Department of Control over Foreign Media, in which she was basically responsible for reading all printed materials that came into the Soviet Union from abroad and determining whether or not a given book or magazine should be banned. Sometimes, the grandmother recalled, she found that she admired certain writers, such as Harrison Salisbury from the New York Times. But to make a simple error in translation (in documents being forwarded to Stalin's office) or allow in anything deemed even the slightest bit subversive could be deadly.

I found myself wondering how these Communist Era officials thought they could possibly maintain control over such a stack of cards: an unstable structure built upon an unstable foundation. But then, according to Croatian journalist and essayist Dubravka Urgesic in "The Souvenirs of Communism," the character of life under these regimes is essentially inaccessible to the West, and for that reason, truly authentic Soviet authors never gained a foothold abroad. "Western readers did not have the feel for communist everyday life, the author's humor was not understood, the linguistic subversion left them cold, and the absurd and grotesque aspects of the totalitarian world remained opaque to them." If that is indeed the case, then I think The Wall in My Head actually comes close to recreating, in elegant and intimate detail for the Western reader, a world that literally collapsed overnight and has wholly transformed itself since.

Obviously The Wall in My Head is a very valuable primary source (I didn't even talk about the photographs and government documents embedded throughout the text) but, despite my love of history, I saw it in more literary terms. But the beauty of a multi-author work is that multiple viewpoints are presented, and I think every reader is likely to see something very different. And really, that's how reality is: everyone's perspective is unique, even when viewing basically the same thing.

Also recommended: Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver

Click here for The Front Table's review.



This is Part I of the Vice Guide to North Korea. While certainly a far more extreme example of Communism than most of the Eastern Bloc ever was, this three-part video series is nevertheless a striking example of the Kafkaesque dictatorship. My favorite part was when the hotel staff tries to demonstrate to the host that there is indeed food in North Korea - by setting an entire empty dining room with sumptuous meals no one will ever eat. The host suspected that the same food was just brought out evening after evening. *Cue "Hotel California."*

Unforgiving Years (A Review)

"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts. . ." - Heinrich Heine

Victor Serge was the pen name of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, born in 1890 in Brussels to impoverished anti-Czarist Russian exiles. He began living on his own at 15 following his parents' divorce. After deciding that the Belgian Socialist Party wasn't radical enough, he became increasingly involved in anarchism, resulting in his expulsion from Belgium in 1909. He then became a journalist in Paris, publishing articles for Le Révolté and Albert Libertad's L'Anarchie. A highly vocal supporter of individualist anarchism and illegalism, Serge clashed frequently with L'Anarchie editor André Roulot, resulting in a schism that ended with Serge assuming Roulot's position. Imprisoned in 1912 on charges of terrorism, Serge was incarcerated when World War I broke out, but nevertheless predicted accurately that the conflict would lead to revolution in Russia. He traveled to Spain in 1917 and participated in an attempted syndicalist uprising. By the time he finally arrived in Russia in 1919, Serge had become disenchanted with anarchism and joined the Bolsheviks, although he disagreed with their desire to spread worldwide rebellion. Despite working for the Soviet government, he became increasingly concerned with its draconian codes against free speech and crackdowns on dissenters. As a libertarian socialist, he also spoke out against the Red Terror, which led him to withdraw from Soviet politics and briefly lead a commune on an abandoned estate near Petrograd. After that failed, he went on a 1922 Comintern mission to Germany, which restored his battered pride in Russia's accomplishments. Yet he still felt that the Comintern was dogmatic, overly bureaucratic, and excessively ideological, and subsequently joined Leon Trotsky's anti-Stalinist United Opposition in 1923, which resulted in his expulsion from the Communist Party and imprisonment in 1928. Upon his release, he published three novels in Paris, only to be arrested again in Russia in 1933. He was allowed to leave in 1936 only after international protests from other prominent radicals. Now living in France, he corresponded with other anti-Stalinists, including Trotsky, and began publishing heated exposés on Stalin's regime. After Germany's invasion in 1940, he fled with his son to Mexico. He had difficulty adjusting to his new life, and his problems were only compounded when the USA-USSR alliance in 1942 made it difficult for him to publish his articles. He wrote two novels during this time, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years, as well as Memoirs of a Revolutionary. His years of imprisonment had damaged his health, however, and the several assassination attempts by Mexican Stalinists didn't exactly help. Broke and harassed Soviet agents, Victor Serge died in 1947 in Mexico City of a heart attack.

Wow. And you thought David Morrell had one helluva of a background.

While no author's works exist in a vacuum, it is especially vital to know who Victor Serge was before commencing his masterpiece novel, Unforgiving Years, first published in English only in 2008 (by NYRB Classics) and currently on Open Letter Press's longlist for Best Translated Book of 2008. Seriously, I cannot praise this book enough. It is epic in every last sense of the word. Originally written in French as Les Années sans pardon and released posthumously in 1971, Unforgiving Years (translated by Richard Greeman) is divided into four parts, the first three, like the panels in a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, altogether composing a panoramic view of the "disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century" (publisher's copy – I couldn't have said it better myself). The overall plot centers on two Russian comrades named D and Daria, yet the true subject is the madness, destruction, and ultimate disillusionment of Europe in the 1930s and '40s.

Part I, The Secret Agent, follows a paranoid D as he races through pre-war Paris, having abandoned the Party and expecting reprisal at every turn. He knows that global catastrophe is on the horizon and seeks nothing more than freedom, beholden to nothing and no one: "No longer to be that thinking molecule within a formidable, relentless, clear-sighted collective, held taut by so much willpower, that it no longer knew what it was doing." Serge illustrates brilliantly the mood of a city on the edge, in all of its Old World bourgeoisie decadence even as calamity looms. There is more fuss over the murder of gay sculptor than the ominous signs coming out of Germany. Except for his wife Nadine, D is a man alone, like the classical figure of Cassandra, a prophetess cursed by Apollo so that nobody would ever believe her predictions. D wonders,

What is conscience? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from within a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?

Through D's internal struggles, Serge establishes what will become one of the novel's central motifs: the new conflict between humanity and what I would call "the machine," a Protean development of the modern era that often takes the form of psychology, technology, ideology, bureaucracy, and all other "rational" attempts at social control and cohesion. "The planned, centralized, rationally administered economy is still superior to any other model," D reflects with Daria during a secret meeting. ". . . But a rational administration must be humane. Can inhumanity ever be rational?" Both agree that the essence of man has been forgotten, because they first forgot their own selves – not individually, but in terms of the soul, now mistakenly seen as "no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism." (That is, a psychological product of Marx's "dead hand of the past" that continues to hinder and oppress the present.) The section ends with D and Nadine on a ship bound to Mexico.

Part II, The Flame Beneath the Snow, follows Daria through the siege of Leningrad, in all of its desperate, indomitable heroism. Once again, Serge is a master of evocation, easily bringing to life another city, this one barely holding out under both the Nazis and a brutal Russian winter. The reader is there when Daria enters in pitch black in the back of a truck, when she walks the bleak streets, when she witnesses the glare of rockets on the periphery. I wrote about a history book a few months ago called For the Soul of Mankind by Melvin P. Leffler, which discussed how the horrors of World War II were felt for decades in Russia, affecting both its foreign policy and view of itself as perpetually under siege by the capitalist West. On the other hand, for all his concern with history and collective memory, W.G. Sebald, author of Austerlitz, chose instead to write fiction in order to truly illuminate the humanity behind objective fact. Serge's own fictional work Unforgiving Years likewise brings to life the suffering of the Russians far more eloquently than either Leffler or any other academic historian working under the rules of scholarly detachment; Unforgiving Years is very similar to Austerlitz in that respect. Here, the foreshadowing of the previous section is also brought out in full force: both the war and Daria's inevitable disillusionment with the regime, even she stands by its people.

Everything is kept secret. The death of a fighter in action. . . Arrest. . . Execution. . . War work, any combat mission. . . Thought, because it is an indomitable force that never knows where it is going or what it will demand, may suddenly find itself mired in a maze of doubts, scruples, questions, inventions, dreams. We want efficient, disciplined thinking, technical thinking – but how is that to be separated from the other, which is anarchic, ungovernable, obsessive, and unpredictable? How to silence the mischievous twin beneath a cloak of reproof and secrecy?

Strangely enough, however, a general's monologue argues that Russia will eventually overwhelm Germany's technical dominance with only the sheer passion and fury of a citizenry defending their homeland, but Daria has had it with military intelligence and its precise mathematical calculations of death and destruction. She requests an undercover foreign assignment.

Part III, entitled Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs, is surprising. After describing so vividly the ordeal of Leningrad, Serge's humanizing depiction of Germans is simply astonishing. Individual characters – particularly despondent Brigitte, demoralized Gunther, and Franz Minus-Two, sarcastic double amputee – are complex and fully realized human beings written with an unflinching realism. Nor does Serge falter as we are taken on a tour of yet a third city, this one wearily facing final defeat even as some cling tenaciously to the ideals of the Third Reich. Interesting that each of the first three sections occupies an urban setting in crisis. Serge seems to be demonstrating the disparity between the heights of civilization and man's continuing inhumanity to man. "She's insane. Shock, schizophrenia? Whole continents have gone insane, civilization is a form of schizophrenia." Despite the jacket copy, Daria does not actually appear until two-thirds of the way through, along with another character from earlier in the story. The focus here is wartime Germany in all its indignation, resignation, and societal shock.

Part IV is Journey's End. Part IV is rest and relief and, finally, light. Part IV is so shattering it will leave you breathless.

***

Please, read this. If you never read anything else this year, read this. Serge, lifelong revolutionary, captures both the zeal of the true believer and the hollowness of the political apostate in dark, dense prose reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad, Serge delves deep into the human psyche, confronts head-on the brutality that lives there, and takes the reader on a corresponding physical journey through a threatening landscape that mirrors the chaos within. In other words, Unforgiving Years is not an uplifting book. It is bitter in tone and prone to lyrical flights of surrealism. Throughout, Serge emphasizes revolutionary fanaticism and world-weary disillusionment as only one who has experienced them possibly can. He writes with a fully authentic voice that effectively explores the full range of human emotions under conditions wholly foreign to the average American reader, today and yesterday: his characters persist through war, poverty, prison, undercover behind enemy lines, and on the run from Communist militants. (In For the Soul of Mankind, when talking about the American home front in World War II, Leffler notes that never has there been so much talk about sacrifice, yet so little actual sacrifice, compared to everyone else.) Again, it is not a pleasant tale, but it is an important one, for it is, above all, an eloquent testimony to both the perils of political fanaticism and the dark rivers of the human heart.

So, needless to say, Unforgiving Years comes highly recommended. It is well-written and evocative; educational and instructive without being pedagogical. It is a work of art composed by someone who lived a turbulent life intrinsically bound to a history's most tumultuous era.

Things in the Night (A Review)

Mati Unt was part of the "Sixties Generation," that cohort of young Estonian writers who came of age as Soviet censorship waned and a new variety of controversial foreign works became available in their country. Any hopes they may have had of "socialism with a human face" were soon thwarted by both the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the underground availability of Western media, which kept Estonian intellectuals well-informed about events abroad. Stalinism, meanwhile, was starting to dissipate, enabling the introduction of numerous great works of foreign literature. Several especially controversial books, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and the Margarita, were even translated into the Estonian language. The Soviets' reasoning was that so few people (roughly one million) spoke Estonian anyway (Russian was the primary tongue of choice), so what was the harm? Mati Unt's second book, The Debt, nevertheless caused a storm when it was published in 1964 for failing to adhere to the Soviet version of moral uplift.

Not surprisingly then, Unt's 1990 novel Things in the Night (translated from Estonian for Dalkey Press by Eric Dickens), written very strongly in the postmodernist vein, is centered on questions of subjectivity and the tension of hidden energy. As such, there is little linear plot to speak of, other than a story arch concerning terrorism and conspiracy. As a metaphor, Unt is especially interested in the phenomenon of electricity, that source of power that pervades our homes, schools, business, and government buildings, but which can also behave in strange and surprising ways (a taxi driver's profanity-laden tirade, for example, describes a fishing trip that is disrupted by a bizarre electrical build-up that charges the entire boat and its occupants). This pastiche mode frequently leads the storyline it into other unrelated topics as well (particularly cacti and cannibals), in addition to poems and fragments of other voices and narratives, such as letters, journals, monologues, and the protagonist's planned novel about an anarchist. The effect is altogether that of an extended stream-of-conscious, as the narrator wanders through a homeland either standing on the brink of transformation or doomed to tragedy; clearly, some unseen force is buzzing in the air, and there is an ever-present pressure felt in daily moments.

Because at an everyday level, life in this country is simply appalling, and if you start trying to describe the horror of it, you really have to devote yourself to the task, stack up thousands of pages of all kinds of absurdities, changes in the shops' opening hours, shortages at the greengrocer's, water taps that run without stopping, thousands of people who speak a foreign language, the lack of greenery around, the wrong time zone on our clocks and watches, rudeness and ill-breeding, loud arguments on trains, shoes that fall to pieces almost immediately, standing in a line for plane tickets, millions of things, billions of obstacles that are put in the way of people here every minute, but I don't want to write about it all, and nobody would want to read it anyway. One would rather push this frustration down into the subconscious. . .

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is paranoia, and Things in the Night exemplifies this motif with a kind of dark subtlety.

If the first half of the book feels annoyingly meandering at times, the understated climax is astonishing in its austere urban silence. Without electricity, the monotonous apartment blocks of Tallinn are frozen under deep snow and biting temperatures and the narrator's cactus collection is mortally endangered. Lennart Meri, Estonia's president from 1991 to 2001, appears as a kind of national savior, which I personally felt was rather simplistic, but Unt is nevertheless very adept at the art of understatement and obviously politics is unavoidable when the Soviet Union is collapsing all around you. In other words, Lennart remains in the background, instead of rolling into Tallinn on a white horse.

In the end, however, Unt was a rebel, albeit a genteel one, and maybe it is the difficult act of finding balance between the individual and the collectivist society (such as the Soviet Union) that is the general theme of Things in the Night. Perhaps the narrator's lone sojourn through a darkened Tallinn reveals a need to connect, to communicate - I'm not sure, it was a difficult book to decipher at times. Says the Investigator:

"Now, at least, you are of the opinion that every individual should develop as much as he is able without fear of spreading himself too thin, grow too expansive. You are supposed to say to everybody: get on with it! Since we can't diminish the masses, we'll change them into individual beings, atomize and pluralize them. . . Most properly developed people don't need a leader or a person to point them in any direction, no didactics, nothing but themselves. That's what you think, but as you know, you are inconsistent in your thinking and there's no guarantee that these ideas will last very long. At any rate, they are dominant for the present and you are acting in accordance with them."

In contrast to the autumnal mood that characterized much of Things in the Night, the novel closes, with quiet and ironic optimism, in springtime in a cemetery, possibly at the dawn of something new for Estonia - like a victory for the singular human being over stagnant communism.

In short: this is not a book for everyone. It is certainly not casual reading. Things in the Night is recommended only if you are willing to 1) do a lot of pondering, 2) take the time to familiarize yourself with a little-known country and its history, and 3) accept that this is very much an internalized story that, like a lot of postmodernist literature, does not follow traditional plot structure and character development.