I'm glad it is just once a year

We were of two minds on the book fair this year.  It's always fun to see what's new in the Lithuanian publishing world but at the time we didn't want to deal with all the people and we knew we would end up more money than we should.  In the end, curiosity won out and we went as early as possible to avoid the rush. 

The music section has grown tremendously with the advent of vinyl in recent years.  Every local artist is now hocking their vinyls but it was the release of a two-volume Kernagis album that I wanted, put out by his children on their own label, a loving tribute to their father who passed away 13 years ago.  Tarp Girnų is Kernagis at his playful, a collection of cabaret songs, mostly his own but with a few of his favorite songs thrown in for good measure. He's one of the few Lithuanian musicians that I really enjoyed, a rousing mix of folk and rock ballads that recall the marvelously experimental time of the 60s, although he began building his repertoire a decade later.

Things seemed to come a decade later during Soviet times.  The time it took international trends to filter in through the iron curtain.  Vilnius had its "Spring" in the 1970s, the first major sign of unrest in the country.  There was even an attempt to stage its own "Woodstock," which was the theme of a movie made in the late 80s and released in 1990 entitled The Children of the Hotel America.  They couldn't have very well have made it at the time of the unrest, as Soviet censors would have never allowed it.  

This was the era Kernagis grew up in.  He was in a movie from that time, A Small Confession, released in 1971 that managed to skirt past the censors by depicting the unrest in more domestic terms.   A few years back, his children released their father's songs from the movie on a 10-inch vinyl, which sold out quickly.  Glad I got my copy when I did.

His children set up a foundation in their father's memory that sponsors a wide variety of projects both creative and medical. Vytautas Kernagis died of cancer at 57, a shock to everyone as he had kept his terminal condition under his sleeve, performing right up to the end.  The foundation is aimed almost exclusively to a Lithuanian audience.  No translations.  Kernagis himself joked that his popularity ended at Liepoja, a Latvian city on the border of Lithuania.  I think he was just being modest, as it is pretty hard not to be taken in by his music and his story.  I hope that his children eventually expand the website to reach a broader audience.

I've long said this is part of the problem when it come to recognition across the board.  So few Lithuanian writers, poets and musicians are translated into English and other languages.  The result is that the country remains a "mysterious island," which Sigitas Narbutis likened to Jules Verne's fantasy novel.  I didn't see any new Lithuanian books in translation other than a tiny collection of Repšys drawings, whose work is  currently on display at the modern art museum in Vilnius.  Even Daina is starting to ask why?

She has been after me for years to learn the language, which I have yet to fully succeed in doing.  However, she is becoming increasingly more concerned that Lithuania isn't doing what it should to make itself known to the outside world other than commemorative tie-dye Liquid Blue t-shirts from when the basketball team competed independently at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympic Games.  A story that was told in The Other Dream Team, a documentary that itself is now a relic. 

We wandered the stalls. The Litexpo hall had started filling and it was getting more difficult to move around.  Lithuanians love books.  Daina had a handful of books she was looking for and I wanted to get her a recent Lithuanian translation of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  Lapas has been very active in publishing some interesting books into Lithuanian but not the other way around.

It was too early to go to any of the scheduled events.  They didn't start until after lunch.  Although there was a discussion on all the recent food books on the shelves. Seems every cook of any local renown has a cookbook available.  We have so many now that we no longer even look at this section.  Daina occasionally thumbs through our collection for new ideas, but otherwise they just gather dust on the shelves.  I still rely on my greased-stained copy of The Joy of Cooking.  

What she wanted most was a new monograph of Kazys Varnelis, which we eventually found. He is one of several Lithuanian painters who earned international recognition.  There's a museum dedicated to him in the heart of the old town, where he lived for many years.

After a couple hours we had enough.  I said to Daina, "I'm glad it is just once a year."  For once, I wasn't carrying a huge number of bags.  It wasn't so much that we curbed our appetites as there weren't that many books that cried out, buy me!  Probably the most interesting thing was the exhibition of posters by Ukrainian artists depicting their sentiments of the ongoing war, which has now entered its second year.  Surprisingly, there was little available of Ukrainian authors translated into Lithuanian.  I guess that will come soon.

We crashed on the couch when we got home and listened to Kernagis as we leafed through our new books.  The Varnelis monograph is beautiful!.  It got Daina recalling her mother's love for books.  My mother was a similar book lover.  Both instilling in us the same passion.  

Unfortunately, we haven't really been able to pass it along to our children, but then they grew up in the digital age, so they rely mostly on their cellphones and tablets.  I must admit it makes more sense in a lot of ways, but still it is hard to beat the touch of a book.  I tried a Kindle reader at one point, but it isn't the same and went back to my old books.  Like vinyls, I think our kids will come around to the same sentiment in due time.