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reviewed in the Chicago Tribune
Gint Aras' magisterial novel, The Fugue plays for all the marbles. Crisscrossing over six decades in the lives of some dozen souls, it anchors its polyphony of voices to a very specific place. Cicero, Illinois is as important a character as Bronza, Monsignor Kilba, Yuri, Gaja, Father Cruz, or anyone else we meet in this epic meditation on war, fate, guilt, and family. No matter what flights of fancy they might take, we're soon returned to 50th Place or Laramie Avenue, to Cicero Stadium or the 14th Street Meat Market. By making the setting so vivid, the time travel necessary to tell this story doesn't seem so farfetched.
Gint Aras' magisterial novel, The Fugue plays for all the marbles. Crisscrossing over six decades in the lives of some dozen souls, it anchors its polyphony of voices to a very specific place. Cicero, Illinois is as important a character as Bronza, Monsignor Kilba, Yuri, Gaja, Father Cruz, or anyone else we meet in this epic meditation on war, fate, guilt, and family. No matter what flights of fancy they might take, we're soon returned to 50th Place or Laramie Avenue, to Cicero Stadium or the 14th Street Meat Market. By making the setting so vivid, the time travel necessary to tell this story doesn't seem so farfetched.
Musical metaphors abound, but early on Aras describes succinctly what the reader's in for:
“Lita knew what a fugue was, a composition of usually two strands—voices—of music that borrowed short melodies and phrases from each other. It was like a game where melodies played side-by-side and pretended to be each other, or sometimes even became one another. They could weave together like braids or plaits, then split up and come together again.”
The 'melody' begins in the Ukraine during World War II. A young man muffles the cries of his infant brother in the basement of a shack under siege, then spends the following forty years wandering around in a fog, a mystery to himself and everyone he comes into contact with. He and everyone else in the book is a displaced person of one type or another. First and second generation immigrants from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Mexico form most of the cast. Their struggle to acclimate to life in the United States is a tense undercurrent throughout. The things they had to do to escape to this new world won't leave them alone, no matter how many years pass, how many cigarettes they smoke, or how many bottles of booze they down.
Rather than proceed chronologically, the story loops in on itself, episodes echo over decades and different people often seem to trade thoughts and threads of conversation as if picking them out of the ether. Over and over people strain to describe music by means of image, colors and shapes standing in for notes as in synesthesia. Dreams described by one person are overtaken by another with no explanation, yet none is needed. Yuri becomes a sculptor just like his grand-uncle Benny, whom he'd never met; Lita tries to play music the same way Lars does, though they don't know each other and never will; countless characters try repeatedly to confess and unburden themselves with little success. The forces which push them all this way and that are beyond any one individual's will or control.
Faith and its opposite are at the heart of this story. Not only do countless scenes take place within a Catholic church, but in their own ways each character is searching for grace. Whether believers or not, they're all trying to reach beyond themselves and their flaws. By art or by prayer, they attempt again and again to wash themselves clean. But the sins of the past won't let them be. Children are made to pay for their parents' mistakes. Secrets lie festering in cobwebbed cellars, waiting to sting whoever has the misfortune of opening the wrong door at the wrong time.
Aras nimbly orchestrates his army of stumbling sleepwalkers over the streets of Cicero. They keep visiting the same places like ghosts unable to be free of their earthly domiciles. They torment each other in a ceaseless quest to transcend but rarely get a moment's peace. Like Dostoyevsky and the other Russian masters to whom Aras is clearly indebted, this book doesn't shy away from the big themes. Time will tell where it belongs in the canon, but in the meantime, he has written a story which should have no trouble holding many a reader under its spell.
The book's own path has been full of pitfalls. It took years for Aras to place it, then, a month after its original December 2015 release, Chicago Center For Literature & Photography (CCLaP)—the local indie publisher which put it out—experienced a serious financial setback, such that the book was pulled from sale. Fortunately, Tortoise Books has sprung to the rescue and the book is again available, as of March 9, 2016.
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