Complicity and Innocence

In Some Unfinished Business, Antanas Sileika employs several effective strategies for creating suspense. He sets the stage for a momentous encounter between two people and resists revealing its purpose — connection? clarity? revenge? — for as long as possible. He repeatedly uses the title’s phrase, “some unfinished business,” the vagueness of which suggests anything from a casual task to an ominous mission. And he disrupts the linear telling of events by jumping back and forth between three distinct times and locations.

Written in straightforward, readable prose, the novel begins in 1959, in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania. An alcoholic poet is drying out at the Pažaislis Monastery Asylum. When a younger man slips into his cell, bottles of vodka in hand, the poet can’t place him. This doesn’t bother the newcomer, though. “I remember you all too well,” he says, his...