Winner of several literature awards, The Taste of Lead is a narrative account focusing on a young Latvian man, Matīss, who seeks and eventually fails
to avoid siding with either power at war in Europe in 1940. Facing the challenges and conflicts experienced by every young man – the discovery of the existence of love, betrayal, good and evil, and, on a personal level, the taste of lead in his mouth. A vehicle for dealing with weighty issues, this novel is characterized nonetheless by the signature irony, wit, and a taste for paradox noted in Bērziņš’ other works. This book explores lines of division; those simple, qualifying lines that set a regular man apart from a hero, the tragically thin line separating peace from war, the demarcating line seen between words and actions, and the contrasting line between giving in and taking action.

The Taste of Lead satisfies the reader with the depth of its humanist voice. Set between the late 1930s and early 1940s, The Taste of Lead was published in 2015, becoming one of Latvia’s most widely debated and in-demand books. In 2016, director Valters Sīlis produced a stage version of the same title, The Taste of Lead, for the National Theatre of Latvia and is now in its third consecutive season. The Latvian Museum of Writing organizes tours of the places mentioned in the novel, and many schools have included it in their mandatory reading curriculum. An excerpt from this novel was included in the Dalkey Archive Press anthology Best European Fiction 2017.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv
 

The stories are independent of one another, but all have one thing in common: the titular character, a man named Gūtenmorgens. He appears to be a completely ordinary citizen, with a wife and children, with his TV, friends, and bottle of beer. He’s sometimes indecisive and passive. As such things often go, however, appearance and behavior can be deceiving. Gūtenmorgens is a hero at heart. Almost everything he thinks about or does is meant to make the world a better place, and to improve his own life. He doesn’t forget about others, either. Gūtenmorgens raises a monument to
his friend the writer. He reconciles a couple who divorced twenty years ago. He even handles developments in geopolitical events, along with the unity of the Baltic States. Gūtenmorgens is also never afraid to get his hands dirty. He shoots at opposing hockey players who beat his team, kills the entire Cabinet of Ministers at least three times a week, and scares other bad people, including his neighbor. Gūtenmorgens will never lay a hand on his neighbor’s dog, though; he loves animals.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

This novel is mostly about the bureaucracy that spreads, disease-like, throughout the whole country, including pre-school education esatblishments. Even the Latvian Ministry of Economics admits that the high levels of bureaucracy are responsible for the nation’s low level of competitiveness. What is bureaucracy all about? It’s mostly about a lack of trust, justified by the need to exert control, about the feeling of guilt so characteristic of Latvians, which they often describe as a sense of responsibility and a desire for self-improvement. It’s about fear, often defined as cautiousness but which basically is simply fear. It’s a story about the desire of one group of people to fit life into a specific legal framework while another group wishes to live freely and creatively. And it’s about the balance required between these two wishes. In many aspects, this novel is about balance. One character in the book falls into a coma, losing his physical balance, while another fails to keep her psychological balance and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv