Some books need a lot of time to come together and they need a specific moment to be read. Some books are too realistic to make it into a work of literature.
The creation of an EU as an institutional structure created not only a horizon of symbolic expectations but also the hopes for a better financial and economic situation. Citizens of countries with a lower income and a problematic social context were happy to use their European rights not only for the free travel opportunity but also for the chance of starting a new a better life.
In Cartography of Freedom - which I´ve read in the German translation Kartografie der Freiheit - the St.Petersburg-born Ukrainian author Andrej Kurkow is following the destiny of a couple of young Lithuanians searching for a better life in the ´old Europe´. I´ve read before the highly absurd and symbolic Death and the Penguin but this book is highly realistic and, in my opinion, a bit too long and lacking a clear red line and too many characters. Mid-story I was feeling that the stories will never end as the accounts of the different couples spread all over Europe are very slow paced and diary-like accounts.
In parallel with the personal stories, there is the journey of the mythical Kukutis, the hero of a the Ballads of Kukutis, by the Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinaitis. Kukutis is the witness of the new realities of an Europe which maybe is too materialistic than the citizens on the Central and Eastern European lands expected to.
As a book about Europeans and their dream, Kartografie der Freiheit is part of a new literature about topics that pertain to the post-Cold War realities. I was really interested in going through the whole book and like it, but I felt like both the story and the characters are lacking in consistency and the story itself was bigger than its planning and development.
Rating: 3 stars
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