Translated from Lithuanian by Marija Marcinkute
Published by Noir Press, 2018, 175 pages. Original version published in 2018.

The Last Day is a book of absurdist short stories by a Lithuanian writer. The protagonists, mainly men (with one exception), are victims of circumstance, caught up in strange situations that they cannot control.

In the title story, people can find out when they are going to die, thanks to a book that records the death dates of everyone in the world, a book that is frighteningly accurate. How do you cope with the knowledge of your last day on earth—or those of your loved ones? Some people decide to go out with a bang, with “leaving parties” where they join their guests for their final moments. When the protagonist, Kolya, insists on knowing the dates for him and his family—against his wife’s wishes—the knowledge does not bring relief. His son is going to die young. When the time approaches, the parents are helpless, waiting for their child’s death.

In A.A.A., things are slightly different: the protagonist is given a strange sort of freedom, a kind of control over his life-changing moments. At key junctures, he receives a letter giving him four choices, including the way in which he is going to die. He has the freedom to choose, but he is also free not to participate and to ignore the letters, but he doesn’t. Maybe if he refuses to play the game, as it were, the fates—or whoever is writing to him—will choose the worst option. He wonders if the letters are coming from God. If so, why doesn’t God simply decide for him instead of putting him through this quandary?

In On the Road, a man spends his life going pointlessly from place to place. It starts with a phone call, telling him he needs to go to a certain spot. When he gets there, he is met by someone who gives him directions to another place. This goes on endlessly. The people who meet him bring him food, and at the end of the day, take him to their homes to sleep. One of these people is his wife, who by now is almost a stranger to him. He moves from point to point in the city without knowing why, but believing that there must be a purpose behind it. In his previous life, he did not feel valued. Now, suddenly, there are all these people meeting him at street corners, giving him food and shelter when he needs it. “I knew that I was doing something important (even if I was not sure what). … I was somebody, that’s for sure. … I felt that this multitude of people were looking after me. … In my old life, nobody had paid any attention to me”.

Creativity has no place in Jaroslavas Melnikas’s world. In The Grand Piano Room, Jura has plenty of space—his home is built to accommodate his needs. He has a room with a grand piano, a studio where he can paint, and an office (his wife’s only luxury seems to be a dressing room). Everything is in its place, just how he likes it. But then one day, the piano room disappears. It is as if it never existed, especially as no one in his family seems to remember it. The piano is now crammed into his studio, leaving very little space for his painting. One by one, the rooms disappear, the house becomes smaller and more crammed, until it is impossible to move. Jura’s neatly ordered life and his creative pursuits have become a distant memory.

In the last story, It Never Ends—the longest in the book—a man stumbles across a cinema that shows a never-ending film about a young woman named Liz. He cannot find a trace of the cinema in the outside world—it is almost as if it exists only for those who need it. It becomes an escape from his family and soon takes over his life. His sense of reality starts to blur. When his daughter tries to tell him something he does not want to hear, he tells himself that she is not really his daughter. His only real point of contact is a young woman whom he meets at the cinema and who is as obsessed with the film as he is, and with whom he has an affair.

Almost all the protagonists are men—the one exception being Nikodimova, the woman in The End, who finds herself growing younger (in a way reminiscent of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) until she goes back to the very start of life—the beginning of a foetus in her mother’s womb. Apart from her, the women in these stories are fairly two-dimensional, even the young woman in It Never Ends, seen through the eyes of the man, who refers to her as the scarecrow, and treats her like a pet who needs to be fed and taken out.

These are strange stories about ordinary people with ordinary lives who suddenly find themselves in bizarre situations. In some of the stories, the protagonists feel that their earlier lives were banal and unsatisfying, while the present “reality” gives them a sense of purpose, even when it involves taking away their freedom. And that is the other thing: all the protagonists lack agency—they just go along with whatever happens to them. The stories have echoes of the totalitarian state: the state had power and knowledge, and would take care of you as long as you did not question it (like the man in On the Road).

There is something haunting and surreal about these tales—the extraordinary is narrated in a completely matter-of-fact way as if it was just another facet of reality, which somehow emphasizes the strangeness of all that is happening.