“” I wake up with a disgusting, hopeless feeling that is already leading to depression, “Soviet literary sign and political puppet Willis Lācis writes in a diary. It seems that Māris Bērziņš has redirected this therapy to the Latvian people, with a rich literature in which Lācis skillfully copes with smooth stories, effective heroes, simple language and appropriate, easily changeable political accents, not Lācis himself. “Nor is it enough for us to understand something about ourselves. This is another genre, it means limitation and depression in pedantic details.
“The Vilis Lācis, whose novels I read to my schoolchildren, barely holding the thick and ragged volumes in my schoolchild’s fingers, has already lost my original glow in my eyes. Māris Bērziņš’s “In times of change, sometimes the essence is revealed, which I would like to smooth out and excuse later. The twentieth century was no exception in this respect,” says Gundega Blumberga.
Māris Bērziņš (1962) has given five novels, several collections of stories and plays to the readers for twenty years of active writing. The writer’s performance has been awarded the Latvian Literature of the Year Award in Drama (2009) and Prose (2015), the Baltic Assembly Award in Literature and the Amber Sodum Award for Innovation in Literature.
The artist of the book is Jānis Esītis.
In 2018, the publishing house Diary began work on a new major project of Latvian literature I am…. A total of 26 new works are planned in the new series: 13 novels and 13 monographs on the classics of Latvian literature. About people whose deeds and thoughts each have shaped us in one way or another, both obviously and unknowingly.
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