When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen’s officer husband’s body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece.
A beautifully written surrealist novel cum political allegory, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes transports the reader between 18th Century Baltic gentry and the narrator’s life in the modern world. The connection between the two narratives gradually becomes clear in a mesmerising fantasy of love, lust and loss as Skijunš creates a work of sublime art that is funny, moving, enlightening and philosophical in equal measure.
'Skujins is a master at personae and a cosmopolitan writer, filling his landscape with extraordinary and unforgettable characters' - World Literature Today
'There are few figures in contemporary literature as well respected as Zigmunds Skujiņš' - Virginia Quarterly Review
There are plenty of reasons you can fail to find the rhythm of a book. Sometimes it’s a matter of discarding initial assumptions or impressions, sometimes of resetting oneself. Zigmunds Skujiņš’s Flesh-Coloured Dominoes was a defining experience in the necessity of attempting the latter. It has quite possibly the most misleading, inaccurate cover copy of all time. Surrealism is an overused term, applied to anything odd, just to the right of realism, but Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is the most straightforward work I’ve seen called Surrealist. This isn’t a criticism of the book itself, it couldn’t be, but when you go into a story wanting the unsettling, funny, and strange, then encounter dry, if beautiful and emotional verisimilitude outside of a few occasions, it is hard not to be disappointed. In addition to claiming Surrealism, the copy tells us that Skujiņš’s novel is split into two parts: the eighteenth century and the modern world. By modern world it means the era of World War II, and with a child protagonist, very much of that wide genre of storytelling.
But enough with the damned throat-clearing and correctives, a book needs to be seen on its own actual terms. Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is a novel with a sense of physical detail that gives the time periods and their characters lush life and a nuanced creation of how those characters interact with each other—both in their emotional connections and in the single touch of the fantastic, where lives separated by time intermingle and overlap. It is the story of a family in a Latvian town surviving the multiple occupations, Russian and German, of World War II, and how just as that history can’t be separated from the past, neither can the individuals from one century to another.
In the eighteenth-century chapters, Baroness von Brīgen mourns her husband’s death in battle until the performing clairvoyant Cagliostro leads her to believe that her husband has survived in some form, telling her “Where there were two, now there is one.” This, and the name of a man, a Captain Ulste, who was recorded as having died with her husband, compels her to visit the Ulste family, where she finds the man alive. He tells her of a doctor supposedly capable of performing miracles, including sewing his top half to the bottom half of her husband. Recognizing the bottom half in the way that lovers do, she sleeps with Ulste and becomes pregnant. And here is the dominant trope of the book, two discrete parts making a new whole, then continuing on in the world to create more. Whether it be people and their nationalities, machines, countries, concepts (“The combination of man and horse has a certain nobleness to it”), magic tricks, the trope runs rampant.
In the twentieth-century portions a boy and his half-Japanese step-brother are raised by his grandfather and another Baroness, who has an uncertain relationship with Grandfather (as he’s called throughout). When Grandfather’s last name is revealed to be Ulste the two histories start to solidify their own cleaving. This is further complicated when the Baron von Brīgen returns to his wife alive and whole, top and bottom. Upon learning of his wife’s pregnancy, he is unable to come to terms with the result of his and Valtraute’s independent actions, and ends up killing himself before the birth of her child. This series of events is the single potentially fantastical core that runs through Flesh-Coloured Dominoes. For a while, following Cagliostro and his colorful retinue (a hermaphrodite chambermaid, a dwarf, a German with five chins, a raven-like astrologer) there’s hope that more of the impossible will occur, but once his later miracle is shown as mere trickery, that hope dies. The eighteenth-century chapters become the period fiction of a baroness and her life among the aristocracy and play clear second-fiddle to the twentieth-century chapters.
In this, there are skillful recreations of life. Readers are familiar with the modern means of showing characters’ awkwardness or boredom, and Skujiņš introduces them to older fidgeting: “The audience can sense something, the tension builds and expands, women in tightly pulled corsets gasp for air in shallow breaths and nervously flick their fans. The men fiddle with their little phials of cologne, bringing their moistened fingers first to the tips of their noses, then to their earlobes.” These small movements of people create a living period, a recognizable variation of our own time, and of the twentieth century of the book. Skujiņš also portrays the morality of the era both as performed and as lived: sex outside of marriage is officially frowned on, but it’s acknowledged that everyone is doing it, often; women dress in their corsets, covering themselves fully, but happy to use the wide skirts to their advantage and publically pee in a garden.
The two periods reflect each other in ways big and small, both showing the fight of the traditional and the modern, both showing hope and fear for the future of culture, both showing characters facing down their ignorance of history. This ignorance is something the novel works against. Flesh-Coloured Dominoes serves as a primer for Lativian history, including asides like Louis XVIII temporary court in Jelgava. In her afterword, translator Kaija Straumanis explains that the original Latvian text contained footnotes, outlining history or explaining phrases from foreign languages, which she blended into the actual narrative. That these are as unobtrusive as they are—only in retrospect do a couple phrases stick out as being incorporated footnotes—shows how well she handled this challenge, one too often performed with stiffness.
Less balanced is the book itself. For the first half or so, the historically older chapters are more interesting, with their potentiality for the magical, for that reality to be somehow different from that of the chapters closer to modern life. In this half, the World War II sections do little to be distinguishable from any number of other tales of that war and the Holocaust. It is material we’ve seen before, separated mainly by being Latvian, with those cultural and historical touches. At some point, however, the balance tips, and the later sections are the more compelling.
The personal relationships of the family members become more complex, more intimately seen. They grow, as relationships should, and the book is the better for it. The narrator and his brother become more familiar with the world, with Grandfather and the Baroness, and more capable of acting and understanding others’ actions. Grandfather is the focus of the narrator’s attention from the beginning, and the way he shapes the boys eventually becomes the shaping of the narrative itself. He creates the narrator’s sense of the world by teaching him what to pay attention to, how to see whole stories instead of one side.
Further unbalancing Flesh-Coloured Dominoes are the ending chapters, suddenly set in the actual modern, our time. They feel extraneous, extending the novel without gaining much. There seems to be an effort to make sure the reader didn’t miss anything, confirming things we already sensed or spelling out ideas already present. What is new could have been incorporated more smoothly, earlier.
While a book hard to settle into, with a structure that is weighted oddly, there is still much to enjoy. Descriptions are exciting along the way, and what Skujiņš has enthusiasm for shows through. Characters, even minor ones, have unique voices: “The pale man’s voice sounds hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a barrel.” Similes refuse the obvious: “He sits frozen, his portly body jammed crookedly into the chair like a misshapen candle in the socket of a slender candlestick.” Facial expressions are physically elaborate, and express much: “If there was anything to read in his motionless face, its features cut as if out of dried-up glue, it would have been mouldy, fly-flecked arrogance and a complete lack of interest in the scene in front of him.” In the end, whether through unsettled expectations, a lack of consistent quality, or too much excess material, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is not a book that will live on in my mind, but Skujiņš writes skillfully enough that any future translations of his work are worth consideration, if hesitant. - P. T. Smith
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13762
The narrative itself is split into two parallel stories. On the one hand, 18th century Baltic German gentry in the framework of Russian Czarism empire: baroness Valtraute von Bruegen with the help of the famous count Caliostro is searching for her husband who has disappeared during Turkish wars, with great effort it is finally established that her husband in a battle had been torn into two and that his lower part has been stitched to the upper part of the local captain Ulste of humble origins. After having found the lower part of her husband, she conceives a child from it and is considering at great length whom to consider as the father of her child, but then her husband returns - in one piece. On the other hand, we follow as if the life story of the author himself through the turmoil’s of the 20th century in Latvia; the story again is atypical, nationalities intertwined in a inseparable mix - Latvians, Germans, Jews, Japanese, whoever else. The connection between the two narratives becomes gradually clear; they click together in details, mentioned as if in passing. It is also a moving experience of life. Skujiņš is known as a master if style - eloquent storyteller, weaving fantasies around history and enjoying the language. - portal.unesco.org/
On the face of it, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is a book of two novels spliced together: its chapters alternate between two wildly different narratives. One is a bildungsroman of sorts that sees the Second World War through the eyes of an unnamed first-person narrator, a young orphan growing up in Riga; the other is set in the 18th century in Vidzeme – part of modern-day Latvia – and aptly centres on a very literal, very macabre case of conjoining two odd halves to make a whole.
Written in 1999 by the renowned Latvian writer Zigmunds Skujiņš, who was then seventy-two years old, the novel was hailed by the critic Guntis Berelis as Skujiņš’s finest work. Skujiņš is in many ways a national hero. In the late 1980s, Skujiņš was at the forefront of Latvia’s Third Awakening, the movement that helped forge the country’s identity as a sovereign nation free from Soviet influence. Fiercely patriotic, his writing is rooted in Latvian history, but has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including this new edition of Flesh-Coloured Dominoes, lucidly translated by Kaija Straumanis.
Baroness Valtraute von Brīgen’s husband, Eberhart von Brīgen, has disappeared while fighting in one of the Russo-Turkish wars that took place in the late 18th century. A letter informing her that Eberhart was hit by a cannonball and blown to such a pulp that that ‘there was nothing left to bury’ has not settled matters, and so a despairing Valtraute seeks the advice of the notorious occultist (read: charlatan) Count Cagliostro, who supplies her with an enigmatic alternative explanation of her husband’s fate: ‘Where there were two, now there is one’.
Skujiņš’s 18th century is far from naturalistic; instead we are plunged into a parodic world of séances and amber-clad Romanov palaces, replete with cameos from caricatured historical figures – Cagliostro, Denis Diderot, Catherine the Great. Everything here is done with a sly wink; the serious is farcical and the farcical is serious. Our third-person narrator makes knowing interjections, stating that ‘the eighteenth century has its idiosyncrasies, after all!’, and characterising a particularly shady episode in the halls of an elaborate manor as being ‘like a comic opera!’.
Much like a comic opera, the characters we encounter resemble actors on a stage, struggling to sit down due to their ‘bulky crinoline’ dresses; their inability to embody the period fittingly is made up for as we indulge, with Skujiņš, in histrionic absurdity. At times, this feels like a comment on the inherent impossibility of the historical novel; often, it’s pure farce. The real explanation for Valtraute’s husband’s whereabouts proves fittingly Rabelaisian: Eberhart’s body was not blown to bits but severed in two by the cannon fire, leaving it up to a maverick surgeon, Gibran, to save him. He succeeded, by sewing Eberhart’s lower half onto the torso and head of another injured soldier, Captain Bartolomejs Ulste.
As a novelist, what do you do when you’ve revealed your hand so early on? Valtraute’s composite husband provides wonderful tragicomic absurdity, from a seedy slapstick scene, vaguely reminiscent of a bawdy English restoration comedy, in which he tries to convince Valtraute that his lower half is indeed Eberhart’s (‘Madame, come, come closer! Your soft hands have the opportunity to find tangible proof’) to a discussion in which Cagliostro suggests that grafting the heads of decorated generals onto ‘youths and men of the lower classes’ might be a viable step ‘towards the equalisation of humanity’. But as the story continues to unfold, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes becomes a different novel altogether. The potency of that mutant image – which, contrary to the claim made on the blurb, strikes me as owing more to Bakhtin than the Surrealists – is never again achieved in Valtruate’s narrative, which becomes less intriguing, more taxing, and at times dangerously convoluted. There is a sense, sometimes pleasant, sometimes jarring, that reading this novel is like engaging in a game of dominoes with the author himself. It feels collaborative, up until the very moment when Skujiņš decides to leave you in the dust.
The second strand of the novel focuses on the coming-of-age of our first-person narrator during the Second World War, and his relationship with his de facto parents: his Grandfather and the baroness Johanna. Skujiņš skilfully alludes to the horrors of Nazi occupation (during which almost the entire Jewish population of Latvia was wiped out) through the gaze of the narrator, who is initially uncomprehending but soon becomes worldly. Even though the two stories appear to be poles apart – one carnivalesque, the other realist – they both serve to reflect the emergence of a Latvian self-image. The former asks what physical attributes make a person a person, while the latter asks what makes a Latvian a Latvian.
When, at the start of the war, Johanna is ordered to be repatriated to Germany through the Nazi-Soviet population transfers, a complex series of events take place involving the discovery of a Jewish ancestor, Johanna’s subsequent arrest by the Gestapo, and her eventual release on the basis of a genealogical technicality. Here Skujiņš is at his more vehement, taking aim at the stupidity of the Nazi project and its attempts to divide people based on bloodlines. For Grandfather – perhaps the closest thing in the novel to a mouthpiece for Skujiņš himself – Johanna’s tribulations show that nationality is not bestowed by genetics but forged through shared experiences. And how could it not be in a country that spent the 20th century being tossed like a chew-toy between Soviet authoritarianism and Nazi terror? For the characters in Flesh-Coloured Dominoes, the German invasion feels hopelessly predictable: ‘There’s nothing to make of it’, Grandfather remarks. ‘Out of one pair of claws and right into another. We got to know one psychopath, God help us survive the next.’
There’s no doubt that Skujiņš is a powerful writer, and Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is a clever, intricate novel, with flashes of comic brilliance in both of its stories. It suffers from this intricacy though; neither the tender relationship between grandfather and grandson nor the emotional intensity of their experiences of war is given enough breathing space, trapped instead beneath the weight of tricksy metafictional machinations and meandering historical detail. Skujiņš seems to want us to take his ruminations seriously, but when so much of his novel is smoke and mirrors, it’s a hard ask. - Michael Delgado
https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/review-flesh-coloured-dominoes-by-zigmunds-skujins/
Flesh-Coloured Dominoes (1999) is yet another interesting and thoughtful novel by Zigmunds Skujiņš. A translation by Kaija Straumanis was published by Arcadia Books in 2014, and was recognized in a 2016 list made by Dedalus Books as one of EU’s best indie novels. [1] The novel explores the unbreakable bondage with our ancestors: the bloodlines that go back centuries and still affect the present.
The title’s reference to dominoes emphasizes the similarities between the board game and the book’s story about the continuity of family — both involve rules, chance, luck, and the creation of long lines with individual parts. Some descendants come into this world offspring of socially accepted marriages between people of the same status, some according to the desire of money and power, some as the fruit of great passion and lust, and some through mysterious turns of fate. In all these cases, their births affect both the people around them and following generations as well.
Guntis Berelis, a well-known Latvian literature critic, has also pointed out the similarity between the game of dominoes and the structure of the novel, because it is put together from various pieces – different times, views, and stories that all together make one whole.[2] In fact, there are two main plot lines in this novel that run parallel to each other. The first one is through the eyes of a teenage boy, and shows life in Riga during the 1930s and 40s. He lives in a small manor on the of outskirts of Riga with his grandfather, step-brother, aunt, and a woman named Baroness Johanna who descends from Baltic Germans. He observes how the war and invading powers decide people’s fates according their ethnicities, facing this tragic situation also in his family and household. The other story is about Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen, a true Baltic German lady of the 18th century. She is a charming woman in her late twenties who doesn’t have children and cannot accept that she has become a widow, so is trying the best she can to find her husband who never returned from war. This search brings her together with a respectable Latvian captain, but her naivety and trust in the superstitions of her time plays a great joke on her. Just as important as finding her lost husband is the Baroness’ strong confidence about her roots – they must be Germans! She cannot handle the mere thought that her bloodline could actually be mixed or even originating from the local peasants. Both plots live their separate lives throughout the novel without crossing each other. However, at one point the reader gets conformation that the described characters are actually distant relatives.
Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is an interesting historical fiction novel that doesn’t get much into the details of its times periods. However, it explores some philosophical issues about humanity, and at the end of the book deconstructs the typical linear timeline by bringing characters and events from different times together into one united and unlimited space.
By mentioning and describing the revolutions and war crimes against civilians, the novel poses the following questions; what is a human? Is a human being’s worth primarily as an individual or as a member of a society? What if each individual is judged first by the context of his race, nationality, family and social status, and only then comes their own personal characteristics and skills? This is why Flesh-Coloured Dominoes would be perfect for a reader who has found these questions to be relevant for themselves, or simply wants to think more about them. - Līga Horgana
http://www.latviaweekly.com/2020/06/literature-review-fesh-coloured-dominoes.html
Zigmunds Skujiņš, Nakedness, Trans. by Uldis Balodis, Vagabond Voices, 2019
excerpt (pdf)
Set in the 1960s, Nakedness is the tale of a young man who has just completed his military service and gone straight to Randava to surprise Marika, the beautiful woman with whom he's been corresponding. The two have never met in person however, and when the young man arrives at her door, he quickly becomes entangled in a bizarre mystery: Marika claims that she has never written to him; in fact, she appears to be involved with someone else. And none of her flatmates will admit to sending the letters. Humiliated, he prepares to return to Riga, but is convinced by one of Marika's flatmates to stay a little longer - a decision that throws him even deeper into the web of conflicting relationships he has unwittingly entered. Each clue he uncovers only makes things more confusing, and eventually the young man's own secrets and mendacity are also revealed. Skujins is an original stylist capable of deploying acute psychological observation as well as clever and often witty imagery, and Uldis Balodis has managed to retain this in his excellent English translation.
Our hero is Alexandrs Draiska, known as Sandris. He has just finished his military service, sometime in the 1960s. He is an only child. His father was twenty years older than his mother. He always got on better with his father. Sadly, his father died and his mother remarried six months later. He is not particularly eager to return home to his mother in Riga.
Sandris is a would-be poet and has published poems in Liesma, a litery magazine. As a result, he received a letter from an admirer, a woman called Marika. Since that time they have exchanged a whole host of letters. Sandris’ plan is to go to Randava, where Marika lives, and surprise her with a visit. He knows that she shares a flat with three other women but, now that he thinks about it, is surprised that she never mentioned the building or which floor she lived on. On arriving at the building, he sees a woman waiting nearby. We will later learn that she is Liba. She tells him that no-one is at home and that, as it is hot, they have probably all gone swimming.
He tries the door and hears someone. A woman opens it. It is Marika, as he recognises her from her photo, which she had sent it and she admits that she is Marika. Unfortunately, she has never heard of him, and denies either writing to him or receiving letters from him. At that point a man appears. He is Varis Tenisons, who turns out to be both Marika’s boyfriend and boss. Sandris is invited in and explains the situation but does not have the letters with him. At that point the other three flatmates turn up – Biruta, Càune (real name: Džuljeta) and Kamita. They welcome him, possibly because there are eighty-five women to every fifteen men in the town, with the women mainly working in the huge textile factory. They encourage him to stay in Randava but he declines, even though he feels less humiliated when Marika first spoke to him, and he heads for the station. - The Modrn Novel
read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/europe/latvia/zigmunds-skujins/nakedness/
Zigmunds Skujins, one of the most renowned Latvian writers of the late twentieth century, was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1926. His work has been translated across Europe and several of his books have been made into films. He is the recipient of numerous Latvian and international literature awards, including a lifetime grant from the Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation.
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