To be (with) human 0

Elvina Baužaitė
www.kamane.lt, 2015-11-10

In brief: Valdas Papievis novel "Odilė, or the airport loneliness" is for anyone in autumn, on the month of November, who does not want anything more - while looking at the storm clouds carried by wind - only that "at least one sister or brother, who had opened their hearts to the Lord... Would pray for us all... For us all, visiterus."

In the latest novel "Odilė, or the airport loneliness" (2015) the protagonist and narrator is staying with a ninety-year old Parisian Odilė. The tenant - by the way single - from the standpoint of attachment needs and values appears there incidentally. Nevertheless, no (!) he gets closer, coincides enough to be able to know another person’s world; reveals the entire life story and while following its dotted contours, pieces of fragments, feels the essence of the human being.

The vacuity of being threatens the one who cannot be met and who fails to meet the ones he wants. Senility or simply the attendants of the unable - the emptiness of time, stretched to infinity and the surplus of space in the novel; the aristocratic luxury of doing nothing aptly named with gentle irony. But sometimes doing nothing is a birthright, nicknamed idleness can even be an obligation, but senility (simply a disability) turns it into privilege - a penalty that tests, when "beauty... floods not only with happiness of being, but also stabs with the meaninglessness and finitude of being: a fall into the abyss of nothing around you and within you" (p. 28).

You can immediately feel the V. Papievis writing style in "Odilė, or the airport loneliness." It sucks you in, poetic sentence ripples easily, nostalgically leading often more than one paragraph, thus, when the images are opening up and emotions waving - serene, dreamy sadness, playful delight - you unintentionally pause, you cannot run along the plot, the inside does not let you, you walk in an intoxicating rhythm, as if slowly shuffling the photographs in the album, remembering, returning meeting and greeting a person, a relative through the small universe light-years and light-years away. This was given great visual meaning by the designer of the book Asta Rastauskienė. A subtle variation of Pranas Gailius painting from the series "Sensitive surfaces" creates an allusion of human moving, floating in space.


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