[ book tip by ] Writing is Breathing

None of the words can be deleted in a work of good prose, just like in good poetry. I really appreciate authors who realize and acknowledge this maxim. Unfortunately, today’s prosaists often forget it. Only good dramatists, poets and essayists remember this maxim more frequently. Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė (born in 1976) made a successful debut in different literary genres. Her play “Liučė Skates” earned huge attention in Lithuania and abroad (in 2004 it won the first prize at Theatertreffen theatre festival in Berlin). Her stories and essays are laconic and full of poetic wisdom.

The author starts her debut novel “Breathing into Marble” (original Lithuanian title: “Kvėpavimas į marmurą”, Vilnius: Alma Littera, 2006) with the following sentence: “The highway glistens in grass like a knife stuck into west”. This sentence encompasses everything that can be expected and what is present in the 208 pages of the novel. To quote one of the first readers of this book, poet and essayist Kęstutis Navakas, we immediately “realise that it will be beautiful and painful. And it is”.

The plot of the novel is sorrowful. It tells a story about a young family residing in a remote grange of today’s Lithuania. Parents are raising a son who has epilepsy and they also decide to offer a helping hand to another star-crossed child. They adopt a child from a foster home who is tormented by various syndromes. A disobedient and aggressive adolescent is a new challenge to test family strength and possibilities to live differently. The husband leaves his wife, the adoptee returns to his foster home. However, the boy does not forget where he lived, even though it was a short period, and maybe he could have lived there much longer. His phobias raise an inexplicable rage. Obsessed by this resentment, the adolescent returns to the homestead and murders the diseased son of his former foster-parent. So, this novel does not lack emotions and psychological intensity.

Unquestionably, the reader only partially learns who is guilty and how the further relationship of the family develops. This is depicted not so much by the plot of the novel as it is by its text and metatext. It is precisely the literary text of the novel as well as its cultural political contexts that is the fundamental advantage of the first novel by Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė, “Breathing into Marble”. Today this novel is favourably evaluated by a number of readers and critics and the book is translated and published in Bulgarian.

One can find more interesting and even more sorrowful plots in modern Lithuanian (and foreign) prose, but none of the works by other authors contains such individual stylistic searches of the author, such colourful intonations of the meaning of words. Such a distinctive style of the author is a rare and impressive gift to the reader by the army of today’s authors of prose. Claiming that Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė likes comparisons, metaphors, symbols and vivid images I would not give a thorough description about the particular style of her novel. Perhaps my note that the components of the conceptual metaphor “breathing into marble” lying in the title of the novel, describe the whole stylistics of the book, would be more explanatory: the rhythm of sentences, which is like natural author’s breathing, warms up and revitalized the “dead” signals of language: familiar symbols, too literary comparisons etc.

The author succeeds: she writes like she breathes, she breathes like she writes. A poetic composition of the novel (chapters, even paragraphs and, definitely, the aforementioned sentences) present the possibilities of such writing – like breathing – to the reader in the quest of different metatexts: moral canon of the family, love code, roots of hatred or brutality in social and psychoanalytical field...

The action of the novel “Breathing into Marble” which takes place in a remote Lithuanian homestead, obtains global, universal signs of destruction of family, society and reality as well as the signs of stopping this destruction. The reader should not expect anything more even from the other, author who, let’s say, wrote a number of novels.

Besides, Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė recently published her second novel “The Thresholds of Benedict” (2008). For her story about the thresholds of the life of a boy traumatized in childhood the author discovered provident, minimalistic stylistic means based on the classics of Lithuanian literature. So, we will not get mistaken if we believe in the renovation of the prosaist’s style: there is also a second, as well as there will apparently be the third, constantly renewing stylistic breathing.
It is a paradox, but a pleasant one: in the world of post-modern literature we meet prose that has not refused classics, and we start believing in its meaningfulness for today’s reader. The decision of the national jury which awarded L. S. Černiauskaitė the European Union prize for her novel “Breathing into Marble” is not coincidental either. The choice of the jury is motivated by meaningful layers that the author revitalized by her breathing: a complex image of the life of young people in the novel and a responsible author’s view to creation, her active social position.

Vytautas Martinkus, Vilnius, September, 2009

[ book info ] Černiauskaitė, Laura Sintija: Kvėpavimas į marmurą. (Breathing into Marble). (original language: Lithuanian) Alma Littera, Vilnius, 2006 . ISBN: 9955-08-996-2.