Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos (Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall)

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Information about the work and context of creation

‘Writers are completely naked in their texts, even when they desire to conceal themselves under fantasies such as the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, events from other lives or the opposite sex,’ says Giedra Radvilavičiūtė. The essays included in the compilation entitled Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall can also be seen as semi-autobiographical. Their sophisticated sensibilities reveal a rich existence and a deep sense of every quotidian moment; they are also very readable, devoid of any pomposity or exultation, often tinged with irony and uncover such experiences as illness, physical fragility, loneliness, inability to pursue stable relationships, the burden of domestic chores, etc. Radvilavičiūtė’s essays reflect the aesthetics of postmodern Lithuanian literature also evident in the works of today’s authors Eugenijus Ališanka, Paulina Pukytė, Gintaras Grajauskas, Marius Ivaškevičius, Jolita Skablauskaitė, Sigitas Parulskis, Jurga Tumasonytė, Agnė Žagrakalytė and Kostas Ostrauskas.

In ten of her best essays, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė travels between the ridiculous and the sublime, the everyday and the extraordinary. In the place of plot, which the author claims to have ‘shot and buried with proper honours,’ the reader finds a dense, subtly interwoven structure of memory and reality, banalities and fantasy, all served up with a good dollop of absurdity and humour. As in all of her work, Radvilavičiūtė plays with the genres of fiction and nonfiction, essay and short story, leading the experiences of life to be ‘unrecognisably transformed, like the flour, eggs, nuts and apples in a cake.’

One of the essays in this book, The Allure of the Text (included in the Dalkey Archive Press Anthology Best European Fiction 2010), lays out five criteria for a good literary work, which the author then goes on to illustrate in the unfolding story. Another story, Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction, is a narrative reflection on a very diverse set of characters. Against the background of other Lithuanian works which create the impression that all Lithuanian literature is marked by doom and gloom, the latter essay is a lighter kind of writing, yet that lightness is also deceptive and acts as a stylistic cover for the work’s more delicate seriousness. The text presents most of the qualities of postmodern fiction such as metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality and thematisation of both historical and political issues. As it is characteristic of postmodern literature, earlier works of other writers are widely quoted, transformed, new meanings created, all to negate the illusion of reality and achieve the so-called fertile disorder through shocking images and the fragmented streams of consciousness. Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction covers scenes from the author’s family life, her writerly (mis)adventures and carries a distinctly essayistic tone in the numerous philosophising tangents and ample metatextual references. As the title suggests, people and interpersonal relationships of all kinds lie at the heart of this piece of writing: imagined dialogues with a departed parent, emergency visits to friends whose pickle jars have exploded, telephone chats with pushy know-it-all editors.

The dominant feature of the essay is its sharp-witted and breezily conversational tone conveyed with ease by Elizabeth Novickas’s nimble translation. Radvilavičiūtė’s authorial voice never for a moment threatens to take itself seriously, even while the subject matter oscillates between the trivial and the profound. The question of the worth of literature crops up more than once in the stories, and Radvilavičiūtė’s takes are suffused with a casual, playful cynicism. ‘I really do think great literature has died,’ she confesses at the outset of the volume’s concluding story. And yet she shows little interest in trying to resurrect the art form, rather preferring to pick at the corpse with her flurry of scattered, sarcastic observations. It is this necessity to try and the simultaneous, keenly felt impossibility of saying anything meaningful that characterises the work’s tone. Life can feel so full of meaning and yet, grasping for words to describe it, every utterance turns into a sad joke. It is ‘impossible to write about her objectively, because love gets in the way,’ the narrator says of a friend.

Although Radvilavičiūtė notes that ‘when you write, you lose your gender,’ she establishes an innovative trend in women's prose as she personifies everyday life, opens up the female world and merges all this with the intertexts of serious culture. Her writings contain an unparalleled authenticity and exciting suggestiveness (which is why her essays are often called ‘personal’). Showing how ‘celebrations almost never coincide with the occasion,’ Radvilavičiūtė opposes the consumerist cynicism of women’s magazines and the superficial gloss of the female image. The theme of loneliness is developed through the character of that same inherently lonely creature, the woman. Yet, the woman faces a paradox when she seeks isolation but cannot radically separate herself from society due to elementary domestic circumstances or family ties. Radvilavičiūtė’s writing is peculiar in that it contains a lot of artistic information in one sentence, a lot of a woman's life, her feelings, the thickness of her world and, most importantly, the ability to look at everything from the outside and with irony.

Another quality of Radvilavičiūtė’s writing is distinctly generational. The stories, originally published in various collections over the first decade of the twenty-first century, embody the voice of an educated forty-something (Radvilavičiūtė was born in 1960), someone who grew up in a world marked by the Cold War and witnessed its fall, and has since made a home for herself in the new configuration. This is evident, for example, in the recollections of the author’s expatriate life in the US in the 1990s, which differ markedly from the more obviously traumatic emigrant stories found in classic novels, although the ever-observant Radvilavičiūtė finds telling traces of those earlier generations and migrations as well. 

Generations – and occasional intergenerational tensions – are also an important running theme in many of the relationships and scenes depicted throughout: mothers and daughters (and their daughters), childhood memories, lost landscapes. Echoes of Lithuania’s recent past regularly emerge from the web of reminiscences and soliloquies, yet the whole is filtered through the prism of a self-consciously post-modern, turn-of-the-millennium mindset. Of all the works considered in this series, Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again is the only one firmly rooted in the present day – suffused with memories yet not overwhelmed by the past.

Indications

Didactic approach: This work can be used in subjects like Lithuanian literature.

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