Just before the big launch party for Love Songs of the Revolution, I was interviewed by Chris Burnett on the show Indymedia On Air on KPFK radio in Los Angeles. It was a sweet to be back in the studio where I used to be one of the hosts.
If you didn't get a chance to listen in live, here's a recording of the interview, which runs about 12 minutes total. We talked about the book, my publisher (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) and current trends in the book publishing industry, and we give a shoutout or two to awesome indie bookstore Skylight Books. I also read an excerpt from the beginning of the book.
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It's exciting to see my book set in Lithuania getting some attention from a newspaper in the Baltic region. The Baltic Times is an English-language paper based in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, with offices in Riga, Latvia, and Vilnius, Lithuania. They've just run a terrific review by Jonathan Brown of Love Songs of the Revolution. Brown is an Irish journalist based in Nablus who writes about Palestine and the Baltics. He's also a periodic editor at The Baltic Times. Brown read the book through the lens of its historical and political context, which is what sets his review apart. A pivotal event in the novel is the massive Baltic Way demonstration that took place on August 23, 1989. Few people outside of the region are familiar with the demonstration and its historical importance. Brown describes it this way: "The Baltic Way triumphed because a multitude of voices became one. United by song, hands, and political ambition, the Baltics formed an immutable force for peace and independence." He calls the book a "Soviet whodunit," and writes about how, at the end of the Cold War, the West viewed and even exoticized the East: "What compelled journalists in droves to the Baltic States and Eastern Europe after independence and the fall of the Soviet Union? Certainly, there was a voyeuristic allure in lifting the veil or 'curtain.' Mostly though, wasn’t it about seeing a world where the West’s political morals were turned upside down? Wasn’t it about seeing a world where corruption goes unchecked, the bad guys don’t go to jail, and the good guys lose out? It’s exactly this political climate that Mauldin coolly and impressively puts on display in 'Love Songs.'" While covering the politics, Brown also gets to the poetics. What more can an author hope for from any reader? "Entanglements aside, the mystery slides sleekly from one suspense, emotional pang, or clue to another, ensuring impeccable timing and delivery. In this, Mauldin’s prose and poise equals that of the highest calibre mystery writing. The book calls to be picked up, even if it’s put down. Poetic gems glitter throughout. Mauldin is sensitive to detail and nuance, her prose is always vivid and alive." We are going to party like it's 1989! This year, August 23 marks the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way, a massive independence demonstration that stretched across three countries, and serves as a major turning point in my novel. So it couldn't be more perfect that the official launch party for the book takes place that day. Please join me at 2pm on August 23 at the downtown LA Central Library for the party. We'll have live music and Lithuanian snacks, and Skylight Books will be on hand with copies of the book for sale. Here are all the details. Hope to see you there! Book Launch Party for Love Songs of the Revolution Saturday, August 23 at 2:00 pm Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St. (map) LA, CA 90071 Meeting Room A (near the 5th Street entrance) Parking info Reviews have been coming in for Love Songs of the Revolution. Of course I think you should read the book, but you don't have to trust me. Ask these fine people: Vilnius might as well be a character, for Kudirka's relationship with the city is romantic, sensual, and redemptive. When Kudirka finds the body of his murdered wife, he grieves her death, calling her "beloved," which is also the way he repeatedly describes the city, "my beloved Vilnius," "my beloved city," "like an old lover." Both his wife and home are his lovers, and Kudirka seems to perform a bit of psychological displacement by trying his best (which isn't very good) to help the independence movement happening in Vilnius in order to allay his guilt over having been a fairly pitiful husband. Kirdurka admits as much, realizing that "if I believed in nothing else, perhaps I could believe in that. If Vilnius was to be an epicenter of a great uprising against the Soviets, then I had to be part of it. For Natalie, if not for myself" and "Vilnius [was] the only lover I'd ever been faithful to." This devotion and romance for his home is his redeeming quality, and it is the thing that pulls us through to the end of the narrative. However, the narrative is not the end of the story. In fact, what happens after Kudirka's memoir is where Mauldin's real genius shows itself. All this changes when Martynas’ wife is murdered. The authorities are reluctant to investigate. He learns that his wife had secrets. He feels compelled to search for the truth. He becomes embroiled with revolutionaries, criminals and spies. All this against the backdrop of Vilnius, a city alive with political and cultural change, a city he writes about with all the passion of the exile. by Goodreads reviewer Kate Vane Solid take on the suspenseful thriller, suitably twisty, takes place in Lithuania in the late 80s, which gives (as is its aim) an intimate and relatable feel to big seemingly cold themes of political unrest and espionage. by Goodreads author Leo Robertson The good natured self-loathing of the main character is explained by the surprising twists introduced in the second portion of the book, where the story takes an unexpected and delightful turn. Overall, Mauldin's masterly prose, ability to create extraordinarily believable characters and brilliant insights into power dynamics, writ large and small, make her an author to watch. by Amazon reader L. Lueders
While doing research on Lithuanian culture for Love Songs of the Revolution, I came upon a YouTube video that changed everything for me. Fuzzy images from a massive demonstration in 1989 are overlaid with a rock anthem whose words I couldn't understand, but whose meaning couldn't be more clear.
The Baltic Way was a major milestone in the Singing Revolution that swept the three Baltic nations in the late 1980s and ultimately led to their independence. No one knows exactly how many people showed up in the streets that day, but estimates run between one and two million people across the three countries.
Music and especially mass singing festivals have long played a major role in Baltic political movements. The rock anthem being sung in 1989 is "The Baltics are Waking Up," written especially for the Singing Revolution, in all three languages. The recording is sung by leading singers from each country:
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Baltic Way. It's an amazing story and a historic moment in European history. We in the West know about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in China, both of which happened the same year, but have never heard about the Baltic Way. Once I learned about it, I knew it would have an important place in my novel. There on he streets of Vilnius in 1989, the crowds holding hands around them and singing for their freedom, the lives of Martynas and Indre are irrevocably changed. In February, Lithuanian prosecutors reopened an investigation into whether the CIA ran one of its notorious "black sites" on the outskirts of Vilnius in the early 2000s. Evidence has been growing since 2009 that, alongside its secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Thailand, Afghanistan and Morocco, the CIA also ran a Lithuanian site in 2004-05 where they may have tortured "high-value" terror suspects including Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Abu Zubaydah. Both men are currently being held at Guantanamo. The prison likely closed in 2005 or 2006, after news about potential secret CIA prisons in Macedonia, Poland and Romania were reported in the press. Cargo planes with markings associated with Richmor Aviation, an airline now known to have conducted CIA rendition flights, were seen coming and going from Vilnius. Other reports say that when the facility was being renovated, local people who stopped by looking for work were turned away by English-speaking guards. In 2009, when the story about the Vilnius black site was first reported, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė was quoted as saying, "If this is true, Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise that it will never happen again." If proven, this would make Lithuania one of only four European countries to permit the Americans to commit torture on their territory. If you're wondering what the Lithuanians got in return for that, one unnamed CIA official had said they didn't ask for anything at all. Abu Zubaydah eventually sued Lithuania in the European court for human rights for their role in his torture. After it was brought to light, Lithuanian officials opened a probe into whether or not the CIA had in fact opened a black site on the edge of town. Strangely, prosecutors found that the CIA had built the prison with the support of the local security service, the SSD, but said there was no evidence that prisoners were ever held there. The investigation was closed in 2011. In 2013, British human rights group Redress and the Human Rights Monitoring Institute in Vilnius lodged a complaint with the country's Prosecutor General, asking him to investigate further. At first the prosecutors refused to reopen the case. Less than a month later, in February of this year, they changed their minds. The investigation will focus on whether Al-Hawsawi was in fact held in Vilnius. One of the books I referred to while doing research for Love Songs of the Revolution was this little tome, a travel guide to Vilnius from 1981. The book was written in Russian by Lithuanian author Antanas Papšys and translated into English by J.C. Butler. It was published by Progress Publishers in Moscow. Here's an excerpt from the introduction: "Vilnius is a city whose rich past is marked by the most important historical events in the life of the Lithuanian people. It is rightly famed for its revolutionary and international traditions; its name is dear not only to Lithuanians but also to peoples of other nationalities living in Lithuania since time immemorial." Some of what's in the guidebook is standard travel material: recommended walking tours, information about the opera and ballet, and what to see if you have only one, two or three days in town. Then there is the uniquely Soviet material, like the full-color photo of a Shop in the Drill Factory. There's a two-page spread devoted to Lenin Square, with both a bird's-eye shot of the park and a closeup of the central statue of the man called Leninas in Lithuanian. During the Soviet era, I learned, the Church of St. John, housed a Museum of Scientific Thought. In 1981, a bus ride from the airport to Vilnius city center would set you back 20 kopecks. If you preferred a taxi, you could order it on the plane from a stewardess. The other great find in this book is this old library card and sleeve inside the front cover. I wonder if anyone else has checked it out since the last time I did. The final page of the book is devoted to this rather charming request to readers: "Progress Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of this book, its translation and design and any suggestions you may have for future publications. Please send all your comments to 17 Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, USSR." I was sad when Google maps couldn't find that address, though I did stumble upon this little gem of a website instead. Here are a few more images from this wonderful time capsule of a book: In 1989, neocon political scientist Frances Fukuyama published an essay arguing that the impending breakup of the Soviet Union marked “the end of history.” It was highly controversial in its day and generated plenty of ink. We still used ink to print newspapers and magazines back then. The phrase “end of history” sounds ridiculous on its face, and Fukuyama didn’t mean it literally. Of course time would march onward and stuff would continue to happen. What he was arguing instead was that all the great “isms” had been tried and proven to be failures. He believed what was left – what every country in the world was on its way toward – was Western-style liberal democracy. From there on out, he argued, the major battles in society would no longer be over Great Ideas like communism versus capitalism, but over small mechanistic things, like increasing worker productivity and figuring out how to access Game of Thrones without having to pay for fifty other channels of crap. Recent events in Ukraine might suggest that the demise of history has been overstated. Residents of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, we’re told, want to reunite with Russia, while those in the west of the country want to join the European Union. The current crisis was set off when then-president of Ukraine refused to sign a free trade treaty with the EU during a November summit in Vilnius. Does Ukraine signal a return to grand ideological struggles? Kleptocracy versus technocracy? Or are we simply feeling the aftershocks of the end of Cold War? Which may themselves be aftershocks of the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Or are we looking at a fight over who will control the oil and natural gas resources needed to fuel the globe’s insatiable appetite for power of an electrical kind? Many countries calling themselves democracies certainly aren’t. There are others that have refused to become Western-style liberal democracies and are doing fairly well for themselves, like Iran and China. Arguments against Fukuyama’s thesis on the end of history have come from both the left and the right. It’s been nearly 25 years since his essay appeared. Eliane Glaser - not a fan of his work - has a thoughtful piece at The Guardian about it. She looks back on the past quarter century and explores some the things Fukuyama may have unfortunately gotten right. It’s definitely worth a read. “Ah, my beloved Vilnius, how I miss you.” That’s how it begins, the first line in my novel, Love Songs of the Revolution. Martynas, your not-so-humble narrator, is in love with his city, even after he is so many years gone from it. Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic nations (the other two are Latvia and Estonia). It’s 115 miles northwest of Minsk in Belarus, 283 miles northeast of Warsaw in Poland. For those of you watching the news these days, it’s 450 miles northwest of Kiev in Ukraine. Grand Duke Gediminas established the city of Vilnius in the 1300s. While out on a hunting trip, Gediminas dreamt of an iron wolf howling on a hilltop, which a priest interpreted as a call for him to establish a city on the hill. Today, the downtown historic center of Vilnius is officially designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, for its beautiful mix of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and classical buildings. Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe to convert to Christianity. It’s said that Napoleon called Vilnius the “Jerusalem of the North,” as it was a flourishing center of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe for many years.
It's is one of those cities like Reykjavik or Kinshasa that you’ve never thought of visiting, though you probably should. TripAdvisor says there are at least 165 different things you can see and do, from the "miracle stone" in Cathedral Square to the statue of Frank Zappa in the Užupis district. (Yes, that Frank Zappa.) |
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