About Lithuanian Literature
An interesting coincidence – the book club led by the guest also celebrates its 10th anniversary in Warsaw, at the Lithuanian Embassy in Poland.
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“In 2016, I held a lecture at the embassy about contemporary Lithuanian prose. Very interesting people gathered – although I had been living in Warsaw for several years, I had never seen them at the embassy’s ‘herring balls’ (receptions with salad mounds and wine). Diplomats, people working in international institutions came, and we decided: everyone wants to talk about literature. The club started as an educational project.
Its principle is strict: we read only Lithuanian literature and only works published after 1989 – starting from Ričardas Gavelis’s ‘Vilnius Poker’, marking the shift to contemporary prose. We follow a consistent historical chain: Gavelis, Jurgis Kunčinas, Sigitas Parulskis, Undinė Radzevičiūtė… We sit in a circle and everyone must express their opinion.
Then – my 45-minute lecture about the author and the structure of the work. At first, everyone seemed to feel a trauma from school literature, but later we grew. Yes, after reading U. Radzevičiūtė, there was surprise: ‘Wow, can Lithuanian literature be like this?’ – recalls J. Čerškutė.
Now the core of the guest club consists of 6–10 people. New members are no longer accepted because the existing ones have a huge contextual background and already compare works of different authors.
“There were also curiosities: one woman, receiving the book list, was surprised: ‘Do I have to read this?!’” – smiles J. Čerškutė.
Reads Only in Bed
J. Čerškutė counts having a library of about 4000 books at home in Vilnius, but has been reading electronic books for several years.
“Electronic reading started in 2010 when I began writing for the culture supplement ‘The Intelligent Life’ of the magazine ‘The Economist’, published twice a year. I had to review books that were not yet published – they appeared only after a few months. Publishers started sending unformatted PDFs or Word files. On the other hand, in 2015, moving to Warsaw, you can’t carry many paper books in suitcases. I arranged with publishers to send PDF files. I read them on ‘iPad’ and ‘Kobo’ readers.
It is convenient professionally: I swipe on the screen, write notes, instantly find necessary quotes through search. I cannot stand other people’s pencil marks in paper library books – they distract and force following someone else’s thought, while a digital file is a clean working tool,” she says.
On the other hand, the club guest is calm about the future of paper books – “paper lasts for decades and centuries, even when servers fail. Literature is alive, and the joy of discovery compensates for everything.”
J. Čerškutė says she reads only in bed – at the table she only writes.
Not What, but How
In her childhood in Panevėžys, her sanctuary was the library on Žvaigždžių Street – at 8 years old she would disappear there for several hours. Probably her favorite childhood book was Astrid Lindgren’s ‘Pippi Longstocking’. In adolescence, the most formative books were Jurgis Kunčinas’s ‘Tūla’ (shocking with its language and love drama in the Soviet era) and Ričardas Gavelis’s ‘Vilnius Poker’ (a text that broke any preconceptions about Lithuanian prose).
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Now, reading various texts, J. Čerškutė misses detective stories – Agatha Christie, Robert Galbraith (Joanne K. Rowling).
“There is a clear formula and rules there,” she states.
In fiction, the guest considers the most important not the “what,” but the “how.”
“I always tell students: Federico Fellini’s film ‘8½’ is famous not for the plot (it is banal), but for how it is made – music, framing, rhythm. The same applies to literature. That is why I chose Ričardas Gavelis: his texts are mathematically precise, rational, constructed like an architectural drawing,” says the Bitė club guest, who studied this writer’s work in her doctoral dissertation and last year published the book ‘Thinking Like a Physicist! The System of Ričardas Gavelis’s Prose.”
Did Not Speak for 3 Years
How does J. Čerškutė evaluate book reviews on Instagram and social networks, where the emotional criterion “liked / didn’t like” prevails?
“I have forbidden students three clichés: ‘sensitive,’ ‘it touched me,’ and ‘I took away a message.’ What touched you and where? What did you take away – is this a shopping center? The critic’s job is to explain the mechanics of the work and evaluate it in context, not to share emotions. Another problem is self-published graphomania. Hundreds of authors publish books at their own expense without any selection or editing. The critic must perform a cleansing function, be like a terror to graphomaniacs,” she says.
The library guest regrets that Lithuania still does not have a very prestigious, large literary prize supplemented with a financial award, but actively participates in selecting and announcing the country’s most creative books in the Book of the Year competition. The initial list of candidates for the top twelve most creative books reaches about 500 books annually. About 70 valuable ones are selected from them, and finally the commission leaves 12.
“The top 5 positions are always clear to everyone, and there are heated discussions about the rest. And yes, after the announcement, we always receive complaints from writers. But the critic must work like a surgeon – without trembling hands. With the late Roland Rastauskas, we did not speak for three years after my harsh review of his novel ‘Venice Live,’ but we managed to reconcile two days before his death. I am calm – I evaluated professionally,” she says.
P. S.
About editors. According to J. Čerškutė, the editor profession is currently the least valued in publishing.
“In Lithuania, usually only language correctors work, fixing commas, but content editors are desperately lacking. An example is Mantas Adomėnas’s novel ‘Coin & Labyrinth’: talented, intellectual,
but excessive. As Arūnas Gelūnas said, ‘the brakes no longer work, the text overflows.’ Every author needs an editor who tells them which 50 pages must be cut,” she says.
The formula for a good book. “For every person, a good book is one that works for them at the right time.”
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