Tripping through Vilnius

A friend of mine recently published a novel, Finding the Moon in Sugar, which one can buy on Amazon. I already wrote a pretty extensive “review” of sorts of it for Lithchat, but I think it might be interesting to the population of Donkey Hottie readers who don’t check out the other site.

In brief, it’s an amusing (yet touching, without being saccharine) first-person narration of a 20 year-old community college dropout who decides on a whim (well, after a drug deal goes bad) to follow an older woman he just met to Lithuania. There follow the usual hijinks involving copious amounts of alcohol, pretty women, fisticuffs, and swearing in Russian, but this should not be confused with the lazy wannabe farce that was the Lithuanian scenes from The Corrections.

Instead, Finding the Moon in Sugar is more like a response to the “brainy protagonist goes to Eastern Europe to find himself” genre we’ve seen in, say, Everything is Illuminated. And I value it highly because of that. Andy Nowak’s the type who seldom has his story told, and I wonder if that’s not a problem. There are ways in which the novel reminds me more of a minor literature–parts of Finding feel like something by Piri Thomas, say, if he lived in Berwyn.

So the novel isn’t to the printed word what Natalie Portman would have you think the Shins are to music, but it’s a fun read all the same. Check out the review on Lithchat, or just buy the thing.

Tags: Deleuze and Guattari, Everything is Illuminated, Gint Aras, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, lithchat, Lithuania, minor literature, Piri Thomas, The Corrections, Vilnius