Just when it appeared that this book season might pass without any surprises along comes a first novel from a young Canadian upstart who goes by the single name Antanas. Its cover, all black with a gold hammer and sickle laid over a grey Swastika, was provocative enough, but it was the title, "No Salutes For Your surrender", that finally goaded me into picking it up.
I was piqued some more by the author's diatribe against Hemmingway on his acknowledgment page. Who could be so audacious as that? Before I had started reading I had it in for this Antanas guy, but by the time I finished the first chapter I knew that I was reading a fellow who is well on his way to becoming a literary force to be reckoned with.
He tells his story with the poise of a veteran novelist and his style is so distinctly European that I couldn't help wondering how he came by it. The answer may lie somewhere in the many allusions that he makes to the great works by Kafka, Conrad, Tolstoy and Hasek -- authors he has obviously studied at length, but his mesmerising voice seems so natural, so innate, that I must suspect it to be more simply a gift. No matter how he won his unique voice, one thing is certain: Antanas has arrived and he is here to stay. -- excerpt from Paul Marvin's review for Culture Magazine - Sept. 9/99
Product Description
When Vince Oskaunas arrives at one of Edmonton's more decrepit cafes for lunch with his father, Andrius, he has no idea that it is to be their very last. Andrius declares such by explaining how Lithuania has finally reclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union and how, therefore, the time has come for him to return home. This confounds Vince, of course, but does not surprise him. Indeed, because his father had never appeared settled or content in Canada, Vince has always suspected that the enigmatic old man would disappear one day.
Neither is Vince surprised when he receives, just twelve days later, a middle-night telephone call that delivers the catastrophic news of his father's admittance into a Lithuanian hospital. Andrius had been showing signs of illness before he climbed aboard the aeroplane and so Vince was quite sure that tragedy would call. What he did not expect was that the old man would survive it or that such would require him to immediately launch a rescue... or that this mission of mercy would lead him deep into love, to family, to the gangsters within eastern Europe's blacker markets, to the "Rutskoi Rebellion" in Moscow and to the gruesome truth about the "war crimes" which had brought about his father's exile to Canada after World War II...
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