White Shroud

Начало книги

Ask any well-read Lithuanian who completed high school after 2002 which work of literature they remember best from their studies and you are almost guaranteed to hear, “Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud – that’s my favourite novel!” Lots of smoking, whisky-fuelled madness, surreal childhood experiences, unbridled passion, the essential moments of twentieth-century Lithuanian history, and plenty of displacement and alienation – all of this, combined with the author’s film-worthy biography, make it understandable that Škėma enjoys cult status in his homeland. Published for the first time in Lithuania in 1988, White Shroud is universally viewed by Lithuanian critics as a novel that would have found its place in the Western literary avantgarde if it had been written in, or translated into, English. Recent reception of the German translation (Das weiße Leintuch, trans. Claudia Sinnig, Guggolz, 2017) indicates that this is finally happening: the novel was a sensation at the Leipzig Book Fair, with influential critics in the main newspapers and magazines expressing shock that Germany had not known about this work and hailing White Shroud as an undisputed European literary classic.

Читать дальше →