Summary of the book:  It is most likely the most beautiful Lithuanian romance novel. The only clear plot line is provided by the narration of an unnamed youth, around his meetings with Tūla, his tête-à-têtes with her, her tragic fate (she dies in a fire in a forest hut under mysterious circumstances), a funeral in which her remains are entombed by the protagonist in a room devoted to their love.

No less important is the setting – the last decade of the Soviet period in Vilnius as seen through the eyes of a youth inclined to opposition, yet who has no power from which to resist. The student hero wanders the streets of Vilnius, goes from café to café, finds himself in a drunk tank, visits people he knows – from artists to packers and plumbers – providing the reader with images fixed in a time that has seized up.

We encounter political conformists, artists who have chosen death by alcohol, as their moral consciousness shrivels in drunken dizziness.

It is a lush depiction of a society without hope that embraces many different fates in a multi-ethnic Vilnius, and spanning many social classes. To the protagonists who make love at a garbage dump, it seems that their passion is more pure than the filthy surroundings of their lives.

Reasons for this choice:  It is a very beautiful, deep, dizzying and tragic tale of love. The narration brings together lyricism and irony, as well as fantasy and absolute authenticity in an original manner. The reader is taken by the flights of Chagall-like vision and the naturalness of language. It is the strongest Lithuanian work of lyrical prose. The author was a born raconteur, who wrote playfully, with great wit and freedom; a stylist who didn’t need to try hard to achieve his desired effect and who drank in the heavy atmosphere of his time (mostly the life of literary bohemians under the Soviets).  Love lights up as the great value, the only peak of existence, where people rise only once and for a short time. However, the opposing streams of life, programming the behaviour of lovers, carry them apart from one another. 

Whirlpools of emotion, climaxes and crises, accompanied by carouse and endless sexual intercourse make up the constantly changing core of the novel.  Characteristic of the novel is the stylistic orientation to slang, colloquial tone, and intimate narrative to you only. The author jumps from poetic ecstasy to self-irony, stinging caricature, naturalist details, not avoiding to too eloquent literary rhetoric. But this free jumping along the tops of distant objects, past and future vents became the manner of his flowing narrative.  Kunčinas’ stylistic possesses the energy of spontaneous break-through and free ramification, which is not restricted by any norms of the modern novel. Tūla made Kunčians famous as the creator of very receptive, freely ramifying, psychological electrified contemporary narrative, involved in the polemic with aesthetised, intellectual sterility of Lithuanian prose.

Rights holder: Rasa Kunčinierè

Published by the Lithuanian Writers Union Publishers
K.Sirvydo 6
Vilnius LT-2600
Tel.: (+3705) 262 89 45
Fax: (+3705) 262 89 45
URL: www.rsleidykla.lt
Email: rsleidykla@is.lt
Director: Ms. Giedrė Šorienė