The White Linen

Reading of "The White Linen" with Corinna Harfouch and Hideyo Harada based on Antanas Škėma's novel of the same name

"The White Linen" is a landmark of modern Lithuanian literature. Written in New York exile, Škėma's novel tells the story of Lithuanian emigrant Antanas Garšva based on the author's own biography. In early 1950s New York, he works as an elevator boy in the city's largest hotel. His daily ups and downs in the lift feel to him like the work of Sisyphus (earning Škėma the epithet "Lithuanian Camus"). The mindless repetition of the same, combined with the sensory overload of American megacity illusion, wears down the already neurotic Garšva, who sees himself as a poet born to leave verses for eternity.

In an expressionist and associative style, interwoven with episodic flashbacks to his own childhood and youth, the awakening of first love and its inevitable loss, political indoctrination in his homeland, and finally emigration, the novel unfolds not only a precise, multifaceted psychological portrait of a driven and wandering man, but also a mockingly distorted mosaic of the twentieth century dominated by ideologies: from socialist Kaunas in Lithuania to the spiritually hollowed, capitalistically gutted postwar New York, beneath whose glittering surface Škėma's merciless scalpel lays bare the festering wound.

Translator Claudia Sinnig has rendered this finely composed tirade in all its harshness, desperation, and linguistic force, giving Škėma a German voice for the first time. For German readers, a belated but genuine rediscovery.

Music plays an important role during the reading. Pianist Hideyo Harada performs piano pieces from Bach through Mozart, Chopin, and Schumann to Čiurlionis and Bartók.

Reading: Corinna Harfouch