“Noted Books”: Review of “The Dead Dance Too” by Eglė Frank

Eglė Frank’s first book is an extraordinary debut, rated as a “Book of the Year” nomination in the category of books for adults. Since 2005 The ongoing “Book of the Year Selections” aims to draw attention to artistically valuable, high-quality literature, and although “Mirę irgi shoka” did not win laurels (they went to Aquilina Cicėnaitė’s novel “English Vocabulary”), it won its place under the sun of contemporary Lithuanian literature.

The “clothes” of the book – front and back covers, flaps – are rarely eloquent. A black silhouette of a woman turned back to the reader, surrounded by yellow hair turning into a snake. The names of the author and the book are consistently repeated in yellow (authors) and black (books). You guess that you will have to come face to face with a character dancing in the face of death, seduced by the author and lured out of the dark depths of the subconscious by seductive language. The temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden, which is indicated by the visual biblical allusion on the cover, becomes an image of creativity and writing. It is no accident that when reading the text, its lining woven from the antagonism of holiness and sin becomes apparent.

In the quotations from the short stories presented in the flaps, which frame the book, the courage to be oneself, resistance to the crowd, on the one hand, are connected with the life and suffering of Christ (“The gang is a crowd, and the crowd is always evil: once sent an innocent to death”, p. 141), on the other hand, with by eros – by tasting the forbidden fruit (“Her trolley park madonna – with graceful, sloping shoulders, like Renaissance madonnas, which she loved to kiss so much”, p. 41). The photo of the author embraced by unknown (not visible) whose female arms, presented on the back cover, illustrates rather the book’s character – “a woman with many faces”, “another woman’s lover”, “a freak” – than the author herself, who is presented in a short biographical sketch, “having three children and three cats.” The border between fiction and reality is disappearing – the author, who flirts with the characters and plays with her own identity, decides to see the short stories with a clear structure in the light of autofiction, with the protagonist of the book supporting, to say the least, secondary characters of the autobiographical “I” that emerged from the subconscious.

It is not uncommon for the characters themselves to double themselves, looking at themselves as if they were a stranger in a mirror or on some other reflective surface: “Standing up, she turned towards the black-painted entrance, carefully watching what the person in the mirror would do, as if hoping until the last second that she would remain sitting in the shade of the acacia tree ” (“Treasury”, p. 22). Often it becomes an escape into another, inverted reality, where girl kisses girl and where sometimes, when their eyes catch a broken shard, they are symbolically guillotined (p. 23).

Lesbian love is one of the most prominent themes of the book, which is examined from various perspectives – long-term relationships, non-committal dating, one-night stands, feelings of non-traditional orientation, childish experiments. On the one hand, lesbianism is shown as something forbidden, dangerous and at the same time irresistibly tempting, on the other hand – as something ordinary and everyday – a household and being that exists right here outside the border or hetero- reality lining: “That woman looked like the housewives in the washing powder commercials, a petite blonde with regular features. Her face was so close that Erika could see the lines around her small mouth and eyes. I just ran away from my husband and children, he said […]” (“Treasury”, pp. 21-22). There are more themes in the book that could be called non-standard – masochism (“she felt with satisfaction how the pins, sliding through the moist mucus, stuck in her tongue”, p. 23), masturbation, incest between a disabled brother and his nursing sister (“When Arthur finally calmed down, I put my hand, still wet from him, on the flaccid penis. I felt the jagged skin of the scrotum contract involuntarily under the pads of my fingers” (p. 98). In fact, after turning to the second half of the book, one gets the impression that the psychological depth of the characters is exclusively directly proportional to their non-stereotypicness, a more subtle sense of psychological motivations and certain behavioral incentives begins to be missing.

The subject of motherhood is delved into in a non-trivial way, but almost exclusively into its dark, unloving sides. A mother with split nipples, thinking about the happiness of the other who gave birth to dead twins (“Kasa”, p. 19), the need to leave her husband and children and “spend Bergmanian gloomy evenings in an imagined black and white reality” (p. 20-21), to endure the smell of her stepson an incapable vain woman (“Heart of an Ox”, p. 106), yearning for her sister’s motherhood (“The Parcel”, p. 131), a pregnant woman longing for blood – “blood would mean that [jai] you won’t have to decide anything yourself” (“Snow”, p. 94). Dancing in the face of death reveals itself as the courage to resist established norms, shaking off the roles imposed by society, balancing dangerously on the edge of losing any restrictive but also protective bonds (and moderation?).

“The dead also dance” engages not only in themes, but also in a catchy, well-mastered, imaginative language. The scenes of the novels run before the reader’s eyes like movie frames. (It is not for nothing that the book is included in the top ten most cinematographic books of 2022 compiled by the Association of Lithuanian Publishers.) And if you stop at a “frame” for a longer time, you feel that it attracts you like a mirror, allowing you to see and become aware of things that are not obvious at first glance, often adaptability and fear negated sides of the self.

Aušra Kundrotaitė

Egle Frank, “The Dead Dance Too”. Vilnius: “Other books”, 2023, 142 p.

The series of reviews “Noted Books” is part of the “Reading Promotion 2022-2024 Action Plan” of the Ministry of Culture, implemented together with the National Library of Lithuania.

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