The Last Girl: A Novel [Hardcover]

Stephan Collishaw (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2003

For a full hour I sat at my desk and stared up at the two photographs. One by one I smoked a packet of twenty Prima cigarettes.... The earth, I felt, was beginning to shift, and the long dead were stirring.

In the closing days of the twentieth century, an elderly writer wanders the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania, possessed by the need to photograph the young mothers of the city. In their faces and the faces of their children he sees the reflection of a secret that haunts him. A secret he has spent years trying to bury.

In a decaying back street of the city a woman struggles to raise her family. As her son dreams of a better life she is torn between Vilnius’s twilight world of prostitution and her determination of securing hope for her children. She too is haunted by memories that rob her of sleep.

In Vilnius the rubble of the Jewish ghetto lies side by side with the fallen statues of communist heroes. Through this tangled debris of past and present the story of the writer’s great love and his even greater betrayal begins to coil its way to the surface and demands to be told.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The tragedies of recent Lithuanian history form the backdrop for Collishaw's impressive first novel. Most prominent of those traumas was the Nazi destruction of the heavily Jewish city of Vilnius, once a seat of rabbinic scholarship. The German occupation was both preceded and followed by oppressive Soviet regimes, which suppressed national Lithuanian culture in favor of Communist ideology. Witness to all this is Steponas Daumantas, now a poet in his 70s living meagerly near the former Jewish ghetto in post-war Vilnius. Celebrated briefly in his youth, he spends his later days drinking vodka and wandering the streets, compulsively photographing young, dark-haired women walking with their babies. Steponas is clearly haunted, but by what? The answer becomes clearer when he strikes up a conversation with Jolanta, one of his subjects. Jolanta reminds him of a Jewish woman he knew before the war, even more so when he learns that her mother is a Jew. Steponas's story is interwoven with that of Svetlana, his Russian washerwoman, whose father was imprisoned by the Soviets for promoting Christian worship. Svetlana, exiled to Lithuania with the rest of the family, goes to desperate lengths to raise money for her son to emigrate to England. The final third of the novel brings these threads together as it takes the reader back to late 1930s Vilnius, where Steponas befriends Rachael, the Jewish woman, shortly before the Nazi invasion. This is bleak stuff, but Steponas is good company, an intelligent tour guide to both contemporary Vilnius and its harrowing past. His voice, combined with Collishaw's assured handling of this difficult subject, make for an absorbing debut.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The words will no longer come for retired poet Steponas Daumantas, in his 70s, who lives in Vilnius, now Lithuania. He is haunted by dark-haired women holding their children in their arms, but he has forgotten why. He follows and photographs them. One of them, Jolanta, gives him a manuscript written by her abusive husband; Steponas, drunk, leaves it in a cafe and searches out Jolanta, who has fled to her mother in the country. Svetlana, who takes in laundry, including Steponas' shirts, finds the manuscript pages and tries to conceal them from her drunken husband and his cronies, who are trying to extort money for its return. Steponas, comforted by the scent of the country, confronts his memory of Rachel, a Jewish neighbor whom he loved as a youth but failed. When Steponas speaks, the tale is in the first person; Jolanta's and Svetlana's interwoven tales are told in the third. The writing is taut, though we can see what's coming long before the old man. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (June 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312312989
• ISBN-13: 978-0312312985
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,660,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vilnius by candlelight, October 17, 2004

By 

James Ferguson (Vilnius, Lithuania) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Girl: A Novel (Hardcover)

I'll give this novel three stars for effort, but that's about it. Collishaw tries to piece together a story that spans three generations of Vilnius, hoping to make some sense of the Holocaust which took place in Lithuania. Only problem is that it took him some 170 pages to finally get around to the heart of his story, in which the narrator retells his time in Vilnius during the height of WWII.

I thought it was presumptuous, to say the least, for Collishaw, a young Brit, to take the point of view of a Lithuanian penshioner. The book drags lethargically for the first two parts as Collishaw tries desperately to get into the mind of his character and offer some background on mid 90's Vilnius. It seems that Collishaw had been reading too much Kafka and not taking enough notes of what he saw in Vilnius at the time, as Collishaw paints it as a dank, dark, depressing place, which I suppose fits the mood of his anti-hero, Steponas Daumantas. He might as well have called him St. Stephen.

Eventually Collishaw gets around to telling what he set out to tell, and that is a story of the Holocaust. Collishaw draws heavily on poetic and painterly metaphors, creating a very naive version of the Holocaust in Vilnius. It moves along well enough, with a cross-cultural love affair, a good Polish pal, and enough intrigue to keep you interested. But, like the rest of the novel, it doesn't say much about Vilnius. It is simply someone trying to empathize with the history of this city.

I guess one should credit Collishaw for making a game effort. But, that's all it is. He obviously lacks the where-with-all to deal with the material he is trying to assemble in this novel. He covers over it with reasonably compelling characters and an atmospheric setting that will be new to most readers, but in the end this is no more than a bowl of milky soup.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply heart breaking, May 10, 2004

By 

E. M. Otis (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Girl: A Novel (Hardcover)

This straightforward, beautifully-written novel breaks your heart and puts it back together again. It is not overly ambitious but the author suceeeds in creating a story that draws you in and makes you reflect. It takes courage and skill for a writer to develop serious weaknesses in a character and still have the readers feel compassion for him or her. In most of these situations, I come to dislike the character. But not in this book. Everyone we meet is multi-dimensional and full of complex baggage. They are just trying to survive and find meaning in a cruel and unfair world. But at the end, the book is all about redemption and new opportunities in life no matter how far a person has fallen. What a satisfying experience!