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The Fugue
After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped of so many places he used to know, while the town's familiar streets, bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To convalesce, he sculpts from collected scrap metal, but his arrival in town soon rouses a young girl, Lita Avila, to curiosity. Could this reclusive and oddly quiet man, whose art is sensitive yet intense, truly be guilty of setting fire to his parents' bungalow and burning them alive? At once an homage to the urban grit of Nelson Algren and the family sagas of Leo Tolstoy, The Fugue is a true epic that spans three generations and over fifty years, a major new achievement in the history of Chicago literature. It considers the effects of war and the silent, haunting traumas inherited by children of displaced refugees. Gint Aras's lucid yet lyrical prose braids and weaves a tale where memory and imagination merge, time races and drags, and identity collapses and shifts without warning.
- GenresFiction
450 pages, Paperback
Published March 8, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 23, 2015
(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
"This...this is the one they'll remember me for." When it comes to this old cliche from the creative world, I wouldn't necessarily mind being remembered as an editor and publisher primarily for Gint Aras' haunting, complex and poetic novel, a good early example of what I think CCLaP is capable of as an indie press when all our cylinders are firing at once. A daunting 500-page saga set within the blue-collar Chicago neighborhood of Cicero, spanning three generations of four families and lasting over 50 years in plot, this manuscript had already been floating around the small-press world for ten years before I saw it, where it was adored by a number of editors but everyone was too intimidated by the marketing challenges to put it out. This is what an indie press does best, release such adored but challenging novels without having to worry about making a gazillion dollars and keeping up with our rivals in the movie and music divisions of the giant multinational corporation we all work for, and I'm proud to be the one to give this fascinating, page-turning epic a public release finally. Weaving in and out of multiple interpretations of the book's title, this is a literary novel for those who love literary novels, and we will be pushing it heavily for next year's awards season. I encourage you to order a pre-release copy, or after December 7th to start downloading the free ebook version, at [cclapcenter.com/thefugue].
"This...this is the one they'll remember me for." When it comes to this old cliche from the creative world, I wouldn't necessarily mind being remembered as an editor and publisher primarily for Gint Aras' haunting, complex and poetic novel, a good early example of what I think CCLaP is capable of as an indie press when all our cylinders are firing at once. A daunting 500-page saga set within the blue-collar Chicago neighborhood of Cicero, spanning three generations of four families and lasting over 50 years in plot, this manuscript had already been floating around the small-press world for ten years before I saw it, where it was adored by a number of editors but everyone was too intimidated by the marketing challenges to put it out. This is what an indie press does best, release such adored but challenging novels without having to worry about making a gazillion dollars and keeping up with our rivals in the movie and music divisions of the giant multinational corporation we all work for, and I'm proud to be the one to give this fascinating, page-turning epic a public release finally. Weaving in and out of multiple interpretations of the book's title, this is a literary novel for those who love literary novels, and we will be pushing it heavily for next year's awards season. I encourage you to order a pre-release copy, or after December 7th to start downloading the free ebook version, at [cclapcenter.com/thefugue].
March 21, 2016
While reading Gint Aras’s novel The Fugue the image that came to my mind was not of an eternal golden braid, but of a broken mirror, cracked and fragmented, each tiny slither reflecting a different aspect of a multifaceted narrative. It’s an image of stasis, of everything at once, eternally present, blindingly coeval. And it turns out that this image is not entirely inappropriate, for the novel features mirrors of more or less importance, and characters who inhabit the present and the past simultaneously, and whose lives are splintered beyond endurance and yet who, for the most part, continue to endure.
The Fugue is set in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, but its geographical and emotional roots are elsewhere – in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia and Mexico – from where many of the town’s inhabitants have departed, often as refugees. Those who have fled the old world have brought their traumas with them, bequeathing them to their children and their children’s children. The novel opens with a primal scene of war, fear and concealment; it concludes with the final, ironic manifestation of that guilt-inducing violence.
The Fugue is thus a novel of paradoxes. Inspired by a notion of the harmonious and contrapuntal progression of musical voices through time, it is equally a story about being stuck in someone else’s nightmare. An epic saga of family lives and losses, it is also a chamber piece with surprisingly few characters. Located squarely in Cicero, its moral implications ripple outwards to cover the entire world. I could not help remembering that faire fugue, in French, means to run away. Some of the characters in the novel have run as far away from themselves as they can possibly get.
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ George Eliot’s astonishing insight, and her attention to the fine-grained textures of daily life, are echoed distantly in Aras’s descriptions of material objects, city streets, and the implications of seemingly innocuous activities such as sharpening a pencil. Yuri Dilienko, perhaps the main character in a novel many of whose personages could lay claim to that distinction, straddles the boundary between the deafening roar of which Eliot writes and its countervailing silence.
Released from a lengthy prison term for murdering his parents, Yuri lives precariously on the impoverished edge of the town’s decaying infrastructure, devoting himself largely to the sculpting of tortured and twisted figures from the scrap metal he scavenges from littered streets and vacant lots. Art, for Yuri, and for the stalled but gifted composer Lars Jorgenson, is a double-edged sword that cuts through to the truth otherwise concealed by the need for forgetting, yet allows anguish and terror to pour out from the ghastly wounds it inflicts.
Yuri may or may not be guilty of parricide (the truth is only partially revealed by novel’s end), but in any event he cannot divest himself of his parents’ presence, for the temporal jump-cuts that incise the storyline ensure that Bronza and Gaja Dilienko remain vividly alive. Indeed, it is this quality of aliveness in all the characters – the Jorgensons, Uncle Benny, Reikel the meat butcher and landlord, Monsignor Kilba and Father Cruz – that constitutes the novel’s principal achievement. It is a rare thing always and everywhere to be totally convinced by the reality of fictional personalities, so it is to the great merit of Gint Aras that he succeeds effortlessly in this respect.
The troubled people whose paths interweave in The Fugue are rarely predictable and seldom consistent. Readers of the novel will find their affections and assessments changing with time and circumstance, so that Gaja, for instance, is at one moment angel, the next demon. Having just seen the excellent film Spotlight, I feared the worst of Kilba and Cruz, who seemed all set up to be monsters, but my expectations were confounded and they, too, develop in interesting ways, while their domestic arrangements and private behaviour are described with documentary-like precision.
Yet it is here that problems might arise for some readers. For me, the novel’s delight in the minutiae of quotidian life – its power to immerse us therein – is both its glory and its Achilles’ heel. As details accrue, as scene follows scene, always intersected by the cross-cutting fault lines of various pasts, one begins to wish for a little more forward momentum, an obvious sign of progression, the unconditional gift of a few significant events. The Fugue has apparently reminded other readers of Tolstoy’s family sagas – a comparison which is unfair both to Mr Aras and Count Leo, whose work never approaches a similar state of suspended animation. To my mind, The Fugue is too long, with too many scenes doing essentially the same thing, too many meetings where issues are left frustratingly unresolved. Once a reader becomes aware of a novel’s coyness in this regard, there is a danger that it becomes alienating or – what is worse – unintentionally amusing. In any case, one must begin to wonder if ultimate revelation can possibly survive such a build-up.
In addition, the structure of a musical fugue is of course meant to be grasped in its entirety in uninterrupted performance. The circumstances of its reception form one of the ways in which music differs from literature: in theory (if not always in practice) we experience music from start to finish in one sitting, while with literature we must be prepared for many interruptions and intermissions, perhaps over weeks. Thus, for me at least, any sense of the fugue as a whole – as a pattern, as an overarching design, as James’s ‘figure in the carpet’ – becomes hopelessly lost and irredeemable.
In my opinion, these are significant flaws in an otherwise accomplished novel that is only occasionally marred by uneven writing. Aras’s prose is unfussy and down to earth, and refreshingly free of pretentions. It does the job intended for it and it does it well. To its great credit, it helps create a world in which the reader is willing to believe. The author brings to bear immense intelligence and sensitivity, and a refreshing disregard for conventional forms. The Fugue truly is literary fiction concerned with the why of narrative and not the what of plot. It cares about people and what they do to one another. Despite my reservations, I believe this is a novel that should be read and probably re-read. That is a sign of literature at its best.
The Fugue is set in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, but its geographical and emotional roots are elsewhere – in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia and Mexico – from where many of the town’s inhabitants have departed, often as refugees. Those who have fled the old world have brought their traumas with them, bequeathing them to their children and their children’s children. The novel opens with a primal scene of war, fear and concealment; it concludes with the final, ironic manifestation of that guilt-inducing violence.
The Fugue is thus a novel of paradoxes. Inspired by a notion of the harmonious and contrapuntal progression of musical voices through time, it is equally a story about being stuck in someone else’s nightmare. An epic saga of family lives and losses, it is also a chamber piece with surprisingly few characters. Located squarely in Cicero, its moral implications ripple outwards to cover the entire world. I could not help remembering that faire fugue, in French, means to run away. Some of the characters in the novel have run as far away from themselves as they can possibly get.
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ George Eliot’s astonishing insight, and her attention to the fine-grained textures of daily life, are echoed distantly in Aras’s descriptions of material objects, city streets, and the implications of seemingly innocuous activities such as sharpening a pencil. Yuri Dilienko, perhaps the main character in a novel many of whose personages could lay claim to that distinction, straddles the boundary between the deafening roar of which Eliot writes and its countervailing silence.
Released from a lengthy prison term for murdering his parents, Yuri lives precariously on the impoverished edge of the town’s decaying infrastructure, devoting himself largely to the sculpting of tortured and twisted figures from the scrap metal he scavenges from littered streets and vacant lots. Art, for Yuri, and for the stalled but gifted composer Lars Jorgenson, is a double-edged sword that cuts through to the truth otherwise concealed by the need for forgetting, yet allows anguish and terror to pour out from the ghastly wounds it inflicts.
Yuri may or may not be guilty of parricide (the truth is only partially revealed by novel’s end), but in any event he cannot divest himself of his parents’ presence, for the temporal jump-cuts that incise the storyline ensure that Bronza and Gaja Dilienko remain vividly alive. Indeed, it is this quality of aliveness in all the characters – the Jorgensons, Uncle Benny, Reikel the meat butcher and landlord, Monsignor Kilba and Father Cruz – that constitutes the novel’s principal achievement. It is a rare thing always and everywhere to be totally convinced by the reality of fictional personalities, so it is to the great merit of Gint Aras that he succeeds effortlessly in this respect.
The troubled people whose paths interweave in The Fugue are rarely predictable and seldom consistent. Readers of the novel will find their affections and assessments changing with time and circumstance, so that Gaja, for instance, is at one moment angel, the next demon. Having just seen the excellent film Spotlight, I feared the worst of Kilba and Cruz, who seemed all set up to be monsters, but my expectations were confounded and they, too, develop in interesting ways, while their domestic arrangements and private behaviour are described with documentary-like precision.
Yet it is here that problems might arise for some readers. For me, the novel’s delight in the minutiae of quotidian life – its power to immerse us therein – is both its glory and its Achilles’ heel. As details accrue, as scene follows scene, always intersected by the cross-cutting fault lines of various pasts, one begins to wish for a little more forward momentum, an obvious sign of progression, the unconditional gift of a few significant events. The Fugue has apparently reminded other readers of Tolstoy’s family sagas – a comparison which is unfair both to Mr Aras and Count Leo, whose work never approaches a similar state of suspended animation. To my mind, The Fugue is too long, with too many scenes doing essentially the same thing, too many meetings where issues are left frustratingly unresolved. Once a reader becomes aware of a novel’s coyness in this regard, there is a danger that it becomes alienating or – what is worse – unintentionally amusing. In any case, one must begin to wonder if ultimate revelation can possibly survive such a build-up.
In addition, the structure of a musical fugue is of course meant to be grasped in its entirety in uninterrupted performance. The circumstances of its reception form one of the ways in which music differs from literature: in theory (if not always in practice) we experience music from start to finish in one sitting, while with literature we must be prepared for many interruptions and intermissions, perhaps over weeks. Thus, for me at least, any sense of the fugue as a whole – as a pattern, as an overarching design, as James’s ‘figure in the carpet’ – becomes hopelessly lost and irredeemable.
In my opinion, these are significant flaws in an otherwise accomplished novel that is only occasionally marred by uneven writing. Aras’s prose is unfussy and down to earth, and refreshingly free of pretentions. It does the job intended for it and it does it well. To its great credit, it helps create a world in which the reader is willing to believe. The author brings to bear immense intelligence and sensitivity, and a refreshing disregard for conventional forms. The Fugue truly is literary fiction concerned with the why of narrative and not the what of plot. It cares about people and what they do to one another. Despite my reservations, I believe this is a novel that should be read and probably re-read. That is a sign of literature at its best.
February 2, 2016
The Fugue is one of the most absorbing novels I have read in a long time. As a musician, I found it fascinating how Mr. Aras took a musical structure (fugue) and applied it to his storytelling. The threads of characters and events interweave and return in surprising ways that give you a gradually deepening insight into the whole of the story. In the same way that a musical composition can only be experienced from moment to moment, I am reminded here how our relationships with other people are just snapshots in time. We can never see the whole of a person in just one moment.
This was a book that I could not put down once begun. And one that, upon completion, left me feeling vaguely "homesick" for the vivid and poignant characters and environment crafted by Mr. Aras. Truly a masterful and important work and one that I give my highest recommendation.
This was a book that I could not put down once begun. And one that, upon completion, left me feeling vaguely "homesick" for the vivid and poignant characters and environment crafted by Mr. Aras. Truly a masterful and important work and one that I give my highest recommendation.
October 6, 2016
A great Chicago story that if all is just - though like the characters in The Fugue, I know better than that - will rightfully take its place among the great Chicago stories.
More - http://www.changeyourlifethiswill.com...
More - http://www.changeyourlifethiswill.com...
January 28, 2016
It's a good book for those who were immigrants to this country, memories are brought back.
August 4, 2017
The Fugue, by Chicago writer Gint Aras, weaves an elegant composition of the experiences of two families across the generations. As the musical work repeats its themes in counterpoint, this novel imitates the structure of a fugue to revisit its themes of love and betrayal, art and survival, from WWII Europe to present-day Cicero. The tale revolves around Yuri Dilienko, a sculptor and ex-convict, whose crimes seem uncharacteristically brutal. His father is a local doctor with demons in his past, and his mother is deeply religious but disturbed. Their neighbors in the working-class town include Lars Jorgenson, the composer of the Fugue, with his Russian wife and their artistic daughter. Their lives are intertwined with friends and lovers and especially the parish priests who span the generations and keep many of the family secrets.
The Fugue can be a difficult read, as Aras freely leaps back and forth in time to show the development of his characters and the ways they face their challenges. But readers who stick with it to the end will be rewarded with a sense of the orchestra bringing its concert to completion.
The Fugue can be a difficult read, as Aras freely leaps back and forth in time to show the development of his characters and the ways they face their challenges. But readers who stick with it to the end will be rewarded with a sense of the orchestra bringing its concert to completion.
November 17, 2017
This is a spectacularly well written and fascinating book about multi-generations of Lithuanian's displaced by the ravages of WWII from their homeland to their adopted town of Cicero Illinois. Here, in a close knit community that revolves around the Catholic Church, we come to know all the secrets and pain that bind them together as a community. The comparison to the epic novels of Russia are apt. It's thrilling to know books like this are still getting written, and that they are taking place here in Chicago. Highly recommended.
June 26, 2018
I enjoyed this multi-generational narrative of working-class, immigrant Chicago. Aras's depictions of the Cicero neighborhood across several decades were evocative and vivid accounts of a struggling Midwestern city. I found the main character, Yuri, to be complex, believable, and worthy of my sympathies. The author's various symbolic renderings of the "fugue" musical genre (and its connections to Yuri's creative life as a sculptor) were original and completely satisfying -- as were Aras's choices to jump around in the story's chronology and end on a rather shocking "full circle" note.
Where the book lost me was in its representations of marital abuse and rape. I understand a lot of this was meant to contextualize Yuri's current day struggles and family history, but the rape scene felt disturbingly sensational and unnecessary to the characters' development in the narrative. I already knew the characters involved were in a terrible and dysfunctional relationship; I felt Aras could have trusted his audience to believe his already astute choices in characterization without resorting to that move.
Where the book lost me was in its representations of marital abuse and rape. I understand a lot of this was meant to contextualize Yuri's current day struggles and family history, but the rape scene felt disturbingly sensational and unnecessary to the characters' development in the narrative. I already knew the characters involved were in a terrible and dysfunctional relationship; I felt Aras could have trusted his audience to believe his already astute choices in characterization without resorting to that move.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 4, 2017
One of the best books I've read in a long time. Period.
June 17, 2022
A marvelous read and masterpiece of literary fiction. Complex, yet easy to read. Well crafted in dialogue and such interesting characters.
January 23, 2016
The Fugue is such a well-constructed, epic-feel of a book. I admire Aras’ ability to seamlessly weave together so many different settings and characters and plot lines, all working together as I imagine an orchestra would, rising to a crescendo. He takes his time telling this story through several different points of view over decades (sometimes jumping forward and back), never rushing, but never dragging either. The characters and settings are fully fleshed out, sins and curses slowly and deliberately unveiled. In The Fugue, we see past tragedies and heartache send waves across generations, burdens carried forward, with a hope that something will come along and finally set Aras' characters free.
July 29, 2016
I really enjoyed The Fugue. I really liked the circular story telling and appreciated the fact that the story itself is fugue-like. The story telling structure reminded me of two of my favorite books, A Light in August and Beloved. I also appreciated the tip of the hat to Nabokov and Lolita with the relationship between Yuri and Lita. A true Chicago tale made up of real Chicago characters. A Chicago classic.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews