LITHUANIA

READ

I have begun to approach the books I read from Eastern Europe with trepidation – they are almost always dark and tragic. The book I chose for Lithuania was no exception. Breathing into Marble, authored by Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė and translated by Marija Marcinkute, tells the story of an adoption gone terribly wrong.

Isabel, an artist, lives in the Lithuanian countryside with her husband Liudas, who is a teacher, and their epileptic son Gailius. Isabel decides she wants to add to their family by adopting a child and she goes to an orphanage that’s run by her friend Beatrice. There, she sees a boy whose “eyes were brown, with irises that seemed as thick as steel – they had none of the softness that would be characteristic of a child.” In fact, “(h)ardness was probably his most distinctive quality; a grisly toughness.” With his eyes locked on Isabel’s, this six-year-old boy named Ilya puts a nail in his mouth and swallows it.

That should have given Isabel a clue as to the challenge she’d be facing if she adopted Ilya, and Beatrice tries to persuade her to take a different child. But Isabel’s response is, “I want him or none of them.”

Shortly thereafter, Isabel and Liudas take Ilya home, and their lives change for the worse. And while we never learn Ilya’s backstory, there is a great deal of information about Isabel’s life and the occurrences that made her the kind of person who would adopt a very troubled child.

In an interview, the author describes Breathing into Marble as “the tragic, poetic story of a family, in which there is everything: love, betrayal, childhood illness, unsuccessful attempts at adoption, alcoholism, abuse, murder, the inner conflict of a female artist.” Černiauskaitė says she was very young when she wrote it, and if she were writing it now, she probably wouldn’t fill it with so many traumatic problems. Even so, the book is beautifully written, and it won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009.

If there is a bright spot to this novel, it is the personal growth that Isabel experiences in the face of all the terrible things that happen to her. The book’s ending doesn’t tell the reader exactly what Isabel will do next, but one is left with the impression that she will be strong enough to deal with whatever is ahead.

COOK

No interesting dishes presented themselves in Breathing into Marble, so I searched the Internet for an appropriate recipe. I found a vegan recipe for a potato dish called kugelis on the Vegetaristan website. Basically, it's shredded potatoes, with flour and herbs added. I thought it would be a very nice accompaniment for the Impossible meatloaf I was making for dinner.

I was wrong -- it was terrible. I don't know if the recipe is at fault, or if I did something wrong, but it was not good. The Impossible meatloaf was great, though!

 

GIVE

There were five Lithuanian projects listed at GlobalGiving. None of them were particularly relevant to the subject matter of the book, so I just chose the one that appealed to me the most – helping a food bank purchase a minivan so they can collect surplus food from grocery stores, warehouses, and farms to distribute to people in need.

According to the project description: “Food is too precious to be a waste. It costs a lot of money, natural resources and a great deal of damage to the planet. It is even more precious when you realize that every fifth person in Lithuania is struggling to have a nutritious meal every day.” With a new minivan, an additional 500 to 700 tons of food can be saved and given to those who need it.

More information about this project is available at 500 t of food: saved from wasting, given to poor - GlobalGiving.

 

NEXT STOP: LUXEMBOURG

LIECHTENSTEIN

 

READ

One of the fun things about writing this blog has been the hunt for books from every country. I wouldn’t have expected to have so much trouble finding a book from the tiny European country of Liechtenstein, where there was no shortage of authors. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that had been translated into English.

Luckily, Lillian and Henriette, who write the Stories of the World blog, came to my rescue. They had discovered a book of poetry, Of Things, written by Michael Donhauser and translated by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron. After they wrote about it for their blog, they kindly sent it along to me. Many thanks, Lillian and Henriette!

I have to say, though, that poetry just isn’t my thing, and these poems in particular really did not appeal to me. The theme that binds all the poems in this book is nature, which seems like a lovely topic for a book of poetry. But the fourteen-page poem about a manure pile that appeared early in the book was not the type of nature-writing I was expecting. I kept hoping it was a metaphor for something else, and there were occasional metaphorical bits in the poem, but mostly, it truly was a poem about an actual manure pile. Long passages from Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Great Complete Universal Lexicon were thrown in here and there, which seemed rather un-poetry-like to me.

There were things I could relate to in a few of the other poems. In “The Marsh Marigold,” for example, the poet describes the beauty of a marsh and meadow – “Yellow-topped with buttercups. White-topped with meadow chervil.” – and laments that it will be built over with apartment complexes. And in “The Larch Forest,” he speaks briefly of love: “The names of flowers as proofs of love. ‘There is no such thing as love, only proof of love.’” Donhauser’s poem, “The Gravel,” (and yes, it’s a thirteen-page poem about actual gravel), contains a political reference – “The crushing of the resistance movement in China colors the gravel.” It also has a nice passage, more prosaic than poetic, about time spent as a child at his grandmother’s home in Eschen.

With more and more readers looking to read books from other countries, I hope that in the not-too-distant future, there will be more options available in translation from Liechtenstein. 

COOK

If the book I read for Liechtenstein was a disappointment, the dish I made for this blog post was decidedly not. I searched the Internet for a suitable recipe and found a wonderful dish on the International Cuisine website called Liechtensteiner Pfannkuchen, which apparently translates as pancakes with compote and berries. Basically, it’s crepes layered with raspberry preserves and topped with berries. I veganized the recipe by using oat milk and Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer, and it was delicious. The website says it’s a dessert, but I had it for breakfast, and then I had seconds. Does anyone know how to say “yum” in Liechtensteiner?

GIVE

Finding an organization for my donation wasn’t easy. There were no projects listed for Liechtenstein on the GlobalGiving website, and it took a long time for my Internet search to turn up anything. Finally, I found the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Switzerland & Liechtenstein. As with Make-A-Wish organizations everywhere, the purpose of this organization is to grant “the most heartfelt wishes of children aged between 3 and 18 living with a serious medical condition to give them Hope, Strength and Joy.”

Some of the wishes they’ve granted have been: “Getting tips from Roger Federer, panning for gold, flying over the Alps in a helicopter, seeing the sea for the first time, meeting a celebrity hero, being a Chef for a day, or meeting a Nobel physicist at Cern.”

More information about the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Switzerland & Liechtenstein is available at Make-A-Wish Foundation of Switzerland & Liechtenstein: MAW (makeawish.ch).

NEXT STOP: LITHUANIA