In Search of Lost Time* in Latvia

Pauls Bankovskis' meditation on Latvian independence is framed within a mystery that hints at time-travelling projections which are fleetingly captured through the medium of digital cameras. The solution** to the mystery is never stated explicitly and the reader is left to draw their own conclusions through the clues that the author provides in the novel and somewhat more clearly in an Afterword.

The story has a present-day protagonist (who seems to not-so-coincidentally be the same age as the author) who retrieves a digital camera from their family's summer home near Miķeļtornis on the Northern Seacoast of the Courland Peninsula in Western Latvia. The images rather blurrily show a human figure in the vicinity of the same landscape, but they seem to come from a time when the trees and buildings were not the same as in the present-day.

Meanwhile, the majority of the story is contained in two sections of journal entries made by a Latvian deserter from the Tsarist Army (later he is a de facto deserter from the Bolshevik Red Army) who travels extensively through Latvia on foot almost from one end to the other, first as he evades the WWI German Army Forces and later as an agent of the Independent Latvia movement. The travels encompass everything from manor houses to sanatoriums where he has discussions on wide-ranging and often esoteric subjects. The climactic event, which is actually very low-key, is his witnessing the declaration of Latvian Independence on November 18, 1918. There is a connection between the soldier and the present-day protagonist which isn’t revealed until the very end so I'm not going to spoil it here.

I would expect that there will be many artistic commemorations of 1918's Baltic Independence in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the year to come, but I don’t expect that any will be as mind-bendingly entertaining as this cross-over novel of historical fiction with magic realism/science fiction by Pauls Bankovskis.

Thanks to Vagabond Voices for shipping the book ahead of the official publication date and thanks as well for their continuing terrific translations series called Changelings, see further at https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/bookshop-changelings/.

* I’m not just pulling the "À la recherche du temps perdu" (In Search of Lost Time) reference out of thin air. The author himself refers to "the taste of the madeleines” towards the end of the book.

**Since the soldier from 1917-18 is presumably the one whose image is appearing on the camera images, the question remains… who or what is “taking” the photos or “projecting” the images through time. The solution that seems to be suggested is that it is the animistic energy contained in the trees. i.e. the trees are taking the pictures. Just my interpretation, but note that a number of times the photographs seem to originate from locations where only trees stand. Also note the discussion of post-humanitarian science especially in reference to trees. I’m not sure whether the latter is an actual thing, but it is certainly suggested with the presumably invented literature references in the book. ( )