White Shroud by Antanas Škėma

Translated by Karla Gruodis 

Considered by many as Lithuania's most important work of modernist fiction, White Shroud draws heavily on the author's own refugee and immigrant experience to tell the story of an immigrant poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. Via multiple narrative voices and streams, the novel moves through sharply contrasting settings and stages in the narrator's life in Lithuania before and during WWII, returning always to New York and his struggle to adapt to a completely different, and indifferent, modern world. Skema uses language and allusion to destabilise, drawing the reader into an intimate, culturally and historically specific world to explore universal human themes of selfhood, alienation, creativity and cultural difference.

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