Valdas Papievis (b. 1962) is a Lithuanian expatriate author of numerous acclaimed novels, laureate of the National Prize for Culture and Arts, and a cherished name in his homeland’s literary scene, whose every new release is met with excitement. For more than 20 years, Papievis has been living in Paris, which appears as a vivid setting in several of his writings. In his novel Ėko (2021, Odilė; also translated to French by Caroline Paliulis and published in 2023 by Le Soupirail), Papievis envisioned a dystopian and decaying Paris overrun with nature, reflecting themes of ecological and civilizational collapse. In Papievis’s most recent, auto-fictional novel, Ankančiam pasauly, we leave Paris for the coasts of Normandy. However, the cultural and spiritual emptiness of the zeitgeist, along with premonitions of catastrophe, already seep from the urban center to the provincial periphery. In Ankančiam pasauly, Papievis reflects on losing sight in a world that itself is becoming myopic.
I remember first encountering the word myopia as a teenager in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in the sentence “Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia.” Being nearsighted myself, the metaphor struck me for how precisely it captured a familiar physical condition and, more importantly, conveyed an estrangement from the world, as a person fails to make out any visual sense or meaning. At the time, “myopia” even had a poetic quality for me, as if Golding were describing a fairytale place where Piggy was the sole inhabitant, isolated rather than guarded by walls of the indefinite and the unknowable. Similarly, Papievis continues this tradition of literary blindness, depicting it as an existential mode of being in the world, concerned with the limits of perception and self-knowledge.
The plot of the novel is sparse: a nameless narrator, a writer, arrives in a coastal town at the request of wealthy friends to take care of their villa’s gardens while they’re away. He spends his days working at the villa, writing, or wandering down the coast, meeting people. He reflects on his first childhood love, a child psychiatrist, and his own fragility and maladaptation to “the rough surfaces of the world” (p. 39). He attends a decadent bourgeois party thrown to mark his departure, yet where he is the least important guest or, in his own words, an intrus – an intruder, a foreign body. At the party, amongst the hedonistic extravagance of the guests, there lingers the anxieties and denial – hence, blindness – of possibly impending war, the abrupt disintegration of the ordinary, the uneasy silence brewing before a cataclysmic storm. The strength of the prose is derived from the ambiguity of what is felt but ultimately unsaid, unheard, and unseen.
From the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s glasses are washed away by the sea’s rising tide and, not long after, he discovers that his eyesight is rapidly weakening. Poor vision dissolves distinctions and plunges the narrator into a contingent and unstable relationship with his surroundings. People’s identities, age, and motivations blur as suspicion and imagination intrude upon the external world:
“And really, who am I to him? Just another newcomer who knows nothing about tides, ebbs, winds, rocks, or anything else for that matter. But when he explained how best to return, there was no contempt or pity in his voice, rather a forgiving concern. But why did he have to say his name – Michel? Or did he introduce himself with a made-up name, like I did? […]
When you don’t know, you can make all kinds of stuff up.” (p. 23)
The novel consistently sustains the tension between the opacity of the self and the uncertainty of the world. Papievis never feels pressure (as a more inexperienced writer would) to resolve this epistemic rift by offering a clean, panoramic view. The reader becomes a blind person being guided, step by step, sentence by sentence, by another blind person. Through ellipses and digressions, the text evokes the experience of viewing the world through failing eyesight – the imagery is expressed in blots and blurs, fragmenting into atmospheric patches that bleed into one another like ghostly watercolors:
“Although the fishing boats and dinghies have long since returned, and no one needs them anymore, their eyes still flash green and red, as if they want to prove the meaninglessness of stability. Walking towards them this evening, I thought that proving meaninglessness is perhaps even more difficult than proving meaning. Indeed, just as the sunset poured out moments and infinity the other evening, so now the night pours out meaninglessness and meaning – it is the same funnel.” (p. 50)
Surprisingly, rather than threading the text from microscopic details, the narrator often abstracts his reflections into what some may call universal or ahistorical “wisdom.” He reflects after the villa party that “history is not made of events and dates, that history transcends events and dates. In other words, rises above them. And that history without events and dates allows us to predict, better than horoscopes, what will happen to us all” (p. 64). The attempt is to see without sight beyond the mundane and into the forces of desire, power, and religion governing human action. But ironically, these abstract statements often ring hollow, as they are incapable of guiding the narrator through the world and only succeed in reinstating his detached insignificance.
The irony sharpens as the narrator sometimes resembles a subtle parody of the world-weary, alienated male writer stereotype (in the vein of Michel Houellebecq and others), especially when he tosses out dry, witty one-liners. For example, at the party, asked if he believes that we and the world are “really crashing”, he quips: “Our glasses are empty – that is why we are crashing” (p. 69) Or, not long after, he says, “Decadence can also be beautiful, just as a junkie’s hand embroidered by a needle can be beautiful.” (p. 70).
However, Papievis prevents his narrator from becoming a cliché by avoiding artificial posturing and moralizing to the decadent masses. On the contrary, the narrator recognizes his own lack of moral fortitude, which contributes just as much to the rise of dictators and tyrants. “And you don’t need to say that I can’t stand up for myself. I know that myself. I was teased for it at school. It’s easier for me to justify a crook than to accuse him that he’s a crook. This is, I think, not only my problem, but a problem of our times in general.” (p. 11) The narrator remains endearing by not giving in to bitter self-pity. Even when he’s ranting, he shows an aching love for the world’s ephemeral beauty, which gets trampled by human greed. Papievis writes:
“It took me many years to realize that the speech therapist was right: the world isn’t shit – it’s wonderful, as long as we don’t screw it up with our nonsense. With our ambitions, our quarrels, our civilizations, our doubts, our selfishness, our fakes, our desires, our hierarchies, our betrayals, our little jokes, our wars, our diseases, our loves, our vices, our orgasms, our psychoses, our tears, our explosives and bullets, our beliefs, our conquests, our domination and cruelty – I am listing only the first things that come to mind because there are so many things that can fuck up the world that, in my opinion, it is impossible to either express or sort them.” (p. 85-86)
What is then meant by a world without human civilization and unruined by every blight that it brings along? We gather that for the narrator (and for Papievis himself), it is the world of nature. Yet this sentiment does not harbor romantic delusions of a pre-urban, prelapsarian state of harmony. Instead, he focuses on the melancholic and ambivalent reality of living between the tides of epochs, just beginning to break:
“I knew that the water would recede slowly and that I would have plenty of time before it returned – I decided to call those hours beautiful, like the de Belles Époques that occur as centuries change, one of which befell us recently and which we had christened the End of History.” (p. 52)
Stuck in time and out of place – our “papievian antihero” reflects on his personal past and the cyclical, unstable nature of time and history but cannot use these reflections to integrate himself into a meaningful continuum. The image of a bug stuck in amber is repeated a few times throughout the novel, symbolizing the existential anxiety of the narrator, yet one he is unable to escape. Leaving the metropolis for the provinces did not bring him closer to clarity or self-knowledge – only a brief glimpse at himself as a wandering intrus in a tumultuous world. What is there left to do? Fittingly, an ophthalmologist suggests, “What does it mean to go blind in a blinding world? The only solution is to learn to walk without seeing.” (p. 119)
Ankančiam pasauly by Valdas Papievis is a compelling introduction for any new reader to a great Lithuanian author. And those already familiar with Papievis will have the pleasure to witness a writer continue to refine his craft and elegant storytelling. Even if some themes are handled a bit too abstractly, the novel achieves being a relevant meditation on uncertain times, where the belief in a world without crisis is the most myopic illusion.
