The story collection Gadflies and Demons is Einfelds’ ninth book. The gadflies and demons in this book are not only metaphorical, but also quite palpable and present. The author and his alter ego Fabulu Jūlis take the reader through the absurd realities of capitalism in the 1990s, while also still managing to entertain. The author asks the reader to confront the question: are those of us living right here, right now, really all that different from the characters in the book, and if we aren’t, what can we expect in our own future? The collection’s eponymous first part brings this question to the forefront, but in its second part, the miniature cycle Winter, which is focused on one of the characters from Gadflies and Demons, the reader journeys along with the author as he unpacks this question on an unstoppable ride into the void. Einfelds’ prose weaves together a surreal worldview with the grotesque, realistic, even rough and naturalistic details of everyday life existing alongside a sense of the romantic and the pain that comes from the fragile nature of ideals in our world today.

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

The structure of Jānis Einfelds’s second collection of short fiction,
 The Man Who Sold Pornographic Pictures, is based on three men telling stories about their erotic adventures. All together, there are 16 accounts of strange, traumatic, and sad sexual encounters. The author has said the stories are based on the “lewd” Latvian dainas (folk songs). Einfelds’s characteristically heightened narrative style is clearly present here, and shows something in common with
the language of myth and folklore, though the stories unmistakably take place in modern times.

That’s why Jānis Einfelds’s stories aren’t erotica in the usual sense of the word, in spite of candid sexual descriptions. His multi-layered works use shocking settings and dense, unusual language to break readers out of their everyday perception. Each piece also seeks to show how strange the world really is. From the author’s point of view, love at the turn of the century is merciless and absolutely unromantic, but also an unavoidable spiritual necessity.

“The book dissects our nighttime selves, which we suppress in daily life because of societal norms,” wrote literary critic Rimands Ceplis after the collection was first published. He compared The Man Who Sold Pornographic Pictures to the works of the Marquis de Sade, and to classic Latvian author Jānis Poruks’s utopian stories about a hero’s journey of purification. By combining outwardly ugly, often fantastical scenes with a style close to poetic prose, Einfelds lifts the veil of existing preconceptions from love. At the same time, he replaces it with a new one.

Contact: Kaspars Eizentāls, kaspars.eizentals@petergailis.lv