Memoirs of a Life Cut Short

Levas Ciparis, the anti-hero of this masterly critique of life in the late Soviet Union, is a man alone and he desperately wants to belong. He is obstructed in this quest by his own innocence and decency, which occasionally cause him to act with absurd inflexibility. In fact, the irresolvable tension between moral probity and necessary compromise is one of the many themes of this novel: "Yes, I truly did believe that if I took up the work of the Komsomol, I would, being an honest, sufficiently pure, persistent person, most certainly be capable of changing and enriching that community." In part, the first-person narration describes the process of being disabused of that delusion. Ciparis is dead and writes letters to his estranged friend Tomas Kelertas, with whom he has something of a love-hate relationship, which became more obsessive after their estrangement. The randomness of life does not always work against Ciparis, as he recounts his experiences from sickly child in a basement flat to his final moments in Leningrad when all options fall away. The system can work in his favour - primarily through a marriage that gains him a father-in-law who is a powerful, intelligent and utterly corrupt politician at the very top of the Soviet regime in Lithuania - but ultimately there is no place for him in that society or perhaps anywhere. Memoirs of a Life Cut Short is full of ideas, doubts and insightful observations on human behaviour borne along on a helter-skelter plot.

Ricardas Gavelis, novelist, playwright and journalist, was born in 1950 - twelve years after the Hitler-Stalin pact led to the Soviet annexation of the independent Lithuanian Republic founded in 1918. By the time he reached adulthood, the Soviet Union had entered the stultifying Brezhnev years. He trained as physicist, and came to literature through physics, when he was assigned to work on academic journals and found that he could write. He loved beautiful things, good food, drink and listening to the blues. According to his widow, "he played poker with demons and death", and became known for his bright, intriguing and deliberately provocative prose, which retained something of the scientist's logic, while coming under the powerful influence of James Joyce. He died in 2002, and is remembered not only as a literary figure enjoying international acclaim, but also as a free spirit with an unromantic view of the world.