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.

 

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