Vilnius Poker [Hardcover]

Ricardas Gavelis (Author), Elizabeth Novickas (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2009

Vytautas Vargalys is stuck in an absurd job, helping to create a digital catalog for a library in Soviet-ruled Vilnius that no one is allowed to access. A survivor of the labor camps, an experience which has left him both physically and mentally damaged, Vargalys is obsessed with finding out "what

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An assemblage of troubled grotesques struggle to retain identity and humanity in an alternately menacing and mysterious Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, under Soviet rule in the 1970s and 1980s. The late Gavelis's first translation into English centers on Vytautas Vargalys, a semijustifiably paranoid labor camp survivor who works at a library no one visits while he desperately investigates the Them or They responsible for dehumanizing and killing the humans around him, including his wife, Irena; his genius friend, Gedis; and the young siren, Lolita. Meanwhile, failed intellectual Martynas chronicles Vargalys's struggle and the city's mysterious energy in his mlog, library worker Stefanija Monkeviciute dwells on her wavering faith and personal humiliations, and the city itself speaks in the voice of a dog, claiming that Vilnius can't distinguish dreams from reality. Wrought—and fraught—with symbolism and ennui, the oppressive internal monologues of the characters and the city show the intense importance and equal absurdity of life. (Jan.)
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About the Author

Ri ardas Gavelis was a prose writer and playwright. He published his first book

Product Details

• Hardcover: 485 pages
• Publisher: Open Letter Books; Univ of Nebraska Press (January 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934824054
• ISBN-13: 978-1934824054
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,145,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tragic love affair in Soviet-controlled Lithuania, March 2, 2009

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vilnius Poker (Hardcover)

Vilnius Poker is the story of a tragic love affair that unfolds during the 1970s in the Lithuanian capital city of Vilnius, then suffering under the oppression of Soviet rule. The novel is presented from four different points of view. The first 300 pages of this 500-page novel are told from the perspective of Vytautas Vargalys, a brilliant but unstable 53-year-old library clerk in love with a co-worker in her 20's, aptly named Lolita. As a survivor of the Soviet labor camps, Vytautas is troubled by a pervading sense of paranoia that gradually leads to madness and tragedy.

After Vytautas's tragic tale ends, the point of view switches to that of Martynas Poska, Vytautas's co-worker from the library who narrates his story via an "mlog"--a kind of stream-of-consciousness electronic diary. Martynas describes many of the same people and events that appeared in Vytautas's narrative but without the filter of Vytautas's lunacy. This new perspective reveals many of the novel's truths to be relative, and the tragic end to Vytautas's and Lolita's love becomes murkier. The final two narratives, one of which is told in a voice from the afterlife, continue the obfuscation and suggest that life in Vilnius is nothing more than "a giant poker game, played by madmen."

Vilnius Poker is dense with ideas, literary allusions, historic events, mythological references, symbolism, and linguistic and philosophical theories. It invites and rewards careful study. Elizabeth Novickas's nimble translation delivers the stylistic diversity that must have been intended by Gavelis. Just as beautiful and brutal elements coexist in the narrative, the prose is alternately poetic and crude.

The novel's highly constrained physical and temporal scope provides a dramatic contrast to its sweeping intellectual scope. The action involves just a few primary characters acting within a single city over the course of only a month. Despite these limitations, the novel's unique approach to time expands its reach. In Vilnius Poker, time does not progress linearly but instead loops through and over itself, creating worlds within worlds in a space that initially seems small.

Reading Vilnius Poker is a serious undertaking that will not appeal to casual readers. Certain parts of the book, particularly the first 300 pages, are repetitive and sometimes tedious. The resulting effect is a highly believable portrayal of deteriorating rationality, an effect that might drive some readers towards their own kind of madness. Those willing to devote the required mental energy, however, will be rewarded with a supremely interesting literary experience. In the words of Martynas: "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."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece, April 7, 2009

By 

William A. Thompson (macomb, il United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vilnius Poker (Hardcover)

VILINIUS POKER is one of those books that is a constant reminder to me, moment by moment, of what a pleasurable, intoxicating, ecstatic experience reading can be. When I say to people that I love to read, what I mean is I love the experience that reading books like this one provides: revelatory ecstasy, even when a book, and this is one of them, that can be difficult to read because the subject matter is as depressing, revolting, disturbing as this one sometimes is. If this book is not reviewed by the NYRB of books or Book Forum or ABR, it will be a kind of sin of omission against a great work.