Quill and Quire,
Feb. 22, 2023

Antanas Sileika focuses on one man’s experience of Soviet-occupied Lithuania in his newest novel Some Unfinished Business. Set between 1947 and 1959, Sileika follows the mysterious relationship between a young boy named Martin and his teacher, Kostas Kubilinskas, who moves to Martin’s small village of Lyn Lake and lives with the boy’s family. Sileika also relies on shifts in time for dramatic effect, alternating between two decades: the 1947 of Martin’s childhood, when he ran errands for anti-Soviet soldiers, and the late 1950s, when, newly released from the gulag, he visits his former teacher at an asylum. As Martin interrogates his former mentor, the undoing of their relationship – and the nature of Kostas’s betrayal – comes into focus. A bildungsroman of sorts, Some Unfinished Business is, in part, a story about one boy’s search for role models in a world where anti-Soviet partisans hide in underground bunkers in the same forests where Nazis dumped their victims in mass graves. The novel probes the limits of justice and questions the value of revenge through the lens of one character’s attempt to reconcile the past with his family’s future. Sileika provides less detail about the political and historical context of his narrative than Garfinkel; instead, he focuses more closely on character to inflect his fiction with the weight of reality – he draws inspiration for Kostas from the real Lithuanian children’s poet and Soviet informant of the same name, who infiltrated and betrayed an anti-Soviet resistance group in order to be permitted by the Soviet government to publish his poetry.