Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis
translated by Elizabeth Novickas

I’ve been struggling for over a week to come up with some concrete thoughts about this book, with very limited results. While reading it I wavered between genuine, if somewhat abstract, enjoyment, and near-physical illness. More than once I fought off the desire to fling the book across the room in utter horror and frustration, and then moments later I found myself underlining an especially lyrical phrase. Gavelis and his character Vytautas Vargalys drove me crazy!

Who is the heroic and tragic and deeply disturbed (and disturbing) Vargalys? Emotionally stunted by coming of age in a labor-camp, Vargalys writhes through life tormented by visions of his lost family, and locked in an epic battle with Them, the creators of the dead-eyed humanity who haunt the streets of Vilnius and the countryside of Lithuania, and to some degree or other the rest of the world.

The events of a single day and of Vargalys’ entire life are conveyed by him in a looping, seeming chaos – individual pixels, colors repeating without apparent relation to each other until you step away. The further away you step the more the picture comes together, and Vargalys zooms in and out repeatedly while maintaining a dizzying clarity. For the first 300 pages of the book you are trapped in his mind as his consciousness roams back and forth through this horrible landscape, past and present and future colliding. This style of narration appealed to me, and I was swept along by it even while I was completely appalled by the grotesque details of his life, by himself and his relationships to the people around him. There is a lot of imagery, and certain details surged out of the muck for air repeatedly – birds, or the lack of them; cockroaches; fog; excrement; sexual organs; stray dogs; and eyes, dead eyes, staring eyes, the glazed and deadly gaze of the Vilnius Basilisk. While the narrative style was compelling, the content was often almost more than I could stand. “If I come across one more wretched reference to genitalia of any type I’m going to scream!” I remember thinking. I almost gave it up entirely on four occasions.

There were hauntingly beautiful, evocative descriptions of the city of Vilnius though, and there was a bit of a storyline that out of pure curiosity I just couldn’t abandon. From the beginning there was a sense of dreadful fate and I lurched through those 300 pages in stubborn pursuit of what was going to happen. Vargalys works in a library, has coffee breaks with his co-workers, sleeps with some of them, watches TV with others, is seduced by a lovely woman named Lolita, and then… shrouded in vines and dusk and seen through grimy windows a murder happens. The narrative is then given into the hands of three other citizens of Vilnius, three other players in the great poker game, and what their cards reveal brings the whole book together in an entirely unsatisfactory and yet inevitable way.

Did I like this book? No not really – not at all to be perfectly honest. But the reading experience was fascinating and much as I would have liked to set the book aside, I was captivated by it. Vargalys was so unlikeable in so many ways – delusional, occasionally violent, with a really revolting view of women and sexuality that I can only be marginally grateful proved to be part of his characterization and not Gavelis’ real opinion…! Somehow though, there was a weird nobleness to Vargalys. Tall, powerful, and handsome to all reports, his bizarre ravings in the context of his own inner landscape had a semblance of the epic and heroic, and at times I could almost believe in him as the tragic champion, the knight in shinning armor, fighting to save Vilnius and humanity from Them:

‘…my meaning is to follow Their footsteps to the very end, wherever that should lead. Even if the world itself hungered for destruction, I was obliged to prevent it…I know this for sure: as long as at least one person thinks this way, everything is not lost.’

Makes me think of Sam and Frodo and their desperate journey to save Middle Earth from darkness. This is not a book about heroes, or the triumph of good though. It is about one mans attempt to escape the ‘unbroken sugary fog‘ that is left in the wake of human atrocities. Whether or not he succeeds is also wrapped in fog.

Conceptually interesting, provocative, and vividly realized…the most agonizing book I’ve read all year. I still feel a bit shaky when I think about it, so for now and probably forever I will let it rest.

This was The Wolves‘ November read. Join us in December for Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.