Poetries of Place
Poet Paul Jaskunas’s new novel brings rural Lithuania and Manhattan to life through the eyes of the emigrants and immigrants he portrays.
Review by Peter Lilly
The Atlas of Remedies is a beautifully written book, with clean and clear prose, and a poetic voice that fills the people and places with mystery and depth. From the outset, author Paul Jaskunas grabs our attention and transports us just over a century into the past, between Lithuania and Manhattan: “One black dawn in the winter of 1901, the children’s uncle rose to hunt. The boy, in bed, waited until he could no longer hear the sound of the man’s boots breaking the crust of the snow in the yard.”
These opening sentences, a deceptively simple description of a winter morning, set the tone for the book in its mystery and intrigue. From then on, the narrative wastes no time filling the reader with the desire to get to know these characters. Jaskunas achieves this through expertly crafted chapters of alternating narratives, with overlapping themes and images, that retain a high level of intrigue and also a seamless cohesion throughout.
The geographical gulfs that are traversed between chapters is no more disorienting than is fit for this story of immigration and alienation. The vast differences between places is described with such a depth and fullness that you fully inhabit each as you are in every chapter, and the common humanity populating each is fully realized so the change is not only accepted but cherished as the stories progress.
The characters that populate this touching work are not merely believable, they are fully alive and breathing. Jaskunas allows us to see the world through their eyes, to inhabit their questions, to hold their beliefs, to struggle with their doubts and in doing so, to learn new things about ourselves and our places.
We spend half of the book travelling with a brother and sister as they set out on their desperate adventure through bleak Lithuania, seeing the widening world through their eyes. The siblings’ personalities complete each other well as they swap strengths and weaknesses throughout the journey. Lukas, the younger brother, is sensitive, volatile, and an observant artist. Ona, his older sister, has a quiet wisdom, yet the vulnerability of one who has been “suffering the crucible of adolescence alone, without another woman in the house.” Through the story they demonstrate the sort of courage that doesn’t overwrite fears and dangers, but pushes through them, so their loss, growth, and accomplishment are intertwined and interdependent.
The other half of the book is spent with their mother, Karolina, who is living in Manhattan. She had moved there out of desperation, with the hope of sending money for her children to join her soon. Jaskunas manages to describe the strangeness of Manhattan at the turn of the twentieth century through the eyes of a rural Lithuanian woman. The descriptions and observations work to build both the character of Karolina and the weighty atmosphere of the story. Karolina must brave the wintery busyness of New York in order to buy some herbal supplies to care for her sick cousin. As she leaves her building, Jaskunas’s descriptions roll into one another in the uncannily untidy way of rural eyes overwhelmed with the details of a metropolis: “In the glass, her reflection blended with a reflection of a black horse stomping on the stones behind her… She pressed through the squalid street, and all around her life teemed and hurried. Here trotted a speckled swine, past a gang of urchins rolling dice beneath a balcony festooned with laundry…”
It is no surprise that Jaskunas is also a poet, with a chapbook forthcoming this year.
Like all good stories, The Atlas of Remedies can be read on multiple levels with different important themes being explored both implicitly and explicitly throughout. The stories demonstrate the importance of home place, and the trauma of losing it. Yet, even more so, the importance of people as home, and the extent that immense geography can be overcome against all the odds. Mysticism, compassion, faith, theology, myth, nature, capitalism, national identity, and language are all explored within the natural movement of the narrative. For example, Karolina’s swirling, swooning journey through Manhattan demonstrates the difference between disinterested professionalism and invested human love. In a 1997 interview between Grace Cavalieri and then-USA Poet Laureate Robert Hass, it is observed that “markets make networks” yet “imagination makes communities.” This insightful observation is beautifully brought to life in Karolina’s journey, as she repeatedly suffers from altruistic distractions while navigating the networks of her life in New York. At a key moment, she poignantly remarks that the factory where she had been working “would do just fine without her. The machine would go on grinding out the instruments as fast as people bought them.” At the same time, the story is filled with people, both family and strangers, who would not “do just fine” without her.
Jaskunas has clearly done an impressive amount of research into the landscapes, culture, and herbal medicines of Lithuania, though again this is not labored, but is integrated into the story and themes with great skill and beauty. One beautiful moment is the memory of Karolina picking mushrooms, when she had told the children, who were worried that she had gotten lost, “But I did get lost… I always get lost in the woods—it’s the only way to find the mushrooms.”
It is no surprise that Jaskunas is also a poet, with a chapbook forthcoming this year. His clear and crisp prose has moments where incantatory poetry rises to the surface. For example, one chapter finishes with the deliciously rhythmic “…and the light of the sun went out over Manhattan in the year 1901.” This is a device he uses sparingly and to great effect as the poetry of the characters’ imaginations and connections is pitted against the harsh and largely hostile world.
The narrative of this book manages to be both a page turner, and deeply reflective. Both questions of “What’s going to happen next?” and “What does this mean?” are provoked in equal measure. Jaskunas does not answer all of your questions and, as with all well-told stories, many of these unanswered questions give a depth of meaning and reality to the stories. They give a grit to the mystery, and mystery to the grit of a tale of hardship and ordeal.
This reviewer found The Atlas of Remedies to be engrossing and transformative. It is an important and attention-capturing story, beautifully told with great skill and precision, where light and love are demonstrated to be delicate, deep, and powerful, through hardship and vulnerability. It is a generous, grounded, and timeless tale that can speak across all the boundaries that the narrative navigates.
* Correction: A previous version of this review described the characters as traveling through Siberia rather than Lithuania.
Peter Lilly is a British writer and poet who grew up in Gloucester before spending eight years in London studying theology and working with the homeless. He now lives in the South of France with his wife and son, where he concentrates on writing, teaching English, and community building. His debut poetry collection An Array of Vapour is available with TSL publications, and his second poetry collection A Handful of Prayers is forthcoming with Wipf & Stock.
The Atlas of Remedies was published by Stillhouse Press on March 5, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy to our reviewer. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
