Finding the Moon in Sugar

by Gint Aras

Gint Aras writing is infused with a rare sensitivity for the thousands of seemingly trivial things that give meaning to life. He invites us to laugh at his hero, then sneaks him into our hearts. Dan Vyleta, author of Pavel & I

Genres: Fiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 2009

Reviews

[Cheryl Anne Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andy, Andy, Andy ... yes, Andy is hapless, but the story is far from the “Gen Y” delusional drug addled male lit we are seeing so much of these days. This story is deeply textured, sentimental, tragic, and hilarious.

Andrew Nowak is an all-American reject: undereducated, a bit of a slacker, the product of a dysfunctional family, and self-proclaimed dirtbag. Andy isn’t even good at being a drug dealer. In his own words: He can’t even sell shit people want.

As our story begins, Andy is waiting in a local laundromat for a client when a very aggressive woman approaches him. This woman turns out to be the Lithuanian internet bride of said client. She promptly offers Andy one thousand dollars to service her -- orally. A hot woman, sex, and a thousand dollars, needless to say, Andy goes home with her. As the story progresses, we get an insider view into Andy’s lost and lonely heart and soul. Andy definitely has the Toa of Pooh. While Andy might be clumsy and accident prone, he is very much self-aware and very aware of the world around him. His simple-mindedness is that of innocence not arrogant stupidity, and that makes Andy very, very charming, much like the stray dog he befriends when he reaches Lithuania. Yes, Andy sells everything, buys a plane ticket, and chases Audra, the Lithuanian Internet Bride, to her homeland. At this point, the story veers off into the predictable stranger in a strange land plot device. We have a lot of wandering aimlessly; we have the wizard of Oz cast of characters, including Toto; and we have dive bars, discothèques, and drug parties, but in reality, this story isn’t about the cliché plotline. It’s really a study in desperation and co-dependence. Audra is mentally ill, and as it manifests itself, we don’t get a medical diagnosis or a laundry list of symptoms, we get to feel its effects very deeply through Andy. His simplistic, colourful, and almost childlike view of the world allows the emotion to stay raw and uncluttered. There are no justifications -- no analysis -- just Andy’s honesty. When Andy finds a picture Audra had drawn in his private journal, I got the chills. Actually, the book was full of insightful thrills, chills, a little romance, and enough twists and turns to keep the story entertaining from the first page to the last, which, by the way, is one of the most poignant parts to the story -- almost an Aesop’s Fable ending, if you will.

I got out my notebook to write down thoughts I was havin’ […:]. Cauze I would think sometimes if I forget then maybe something didn’t happen. If you can’t remember clean how stuff happens, what’s the point of it happening?

Audra put love, a real important word where you can’t throw it around like wet pants, especially if you’re an English teacher and they make you study all the most hardcore words they got.

Inside some stairs was a huge Jesus, like three feet tall hanging on a cross. The statue got its legs rubbed for maybe two hundred years, so them feet didn’t even have no toes, all of them totally worn off.

Some of the stuff she (Audra) wanted is only supposed to be on the internet, like with a blindfold or straps.

That one real heavy suitcase […:] was full of notebooks. Audra wrote English a lot. She drew real good, like professional, though lots of them drawings were perverted stuff or painful things...somebody cuttin’ a girl’s eye with a razor.

I brung my notebook and took it out of my backpack. And in there I seen a big surprise. Audra drew a picture. It was a girl peekin’ around a corner…only one eye and cheek and half a mouth was showin’. That girl looked kinda sneaky, like she was runnin’ away from somebody chasin’ her, though also she looked real curious. Underneath the picture Audra wrote, If you want to leave just tell me. I’ll get by on my own. I got this crazy buzz all over my body, totally like I got haunted. She let me know she read the whole notebook cause she underlined stuff I wrote on each page […:]. Holy crap, it made me feel real ashamed. But also I got paranoid like somebody’s watchin’ me…someone spyin’ on me with binoculars.

A real thing is like blood in your mouth. Like you die and everything goes away with some blood down your face. You can taste that blood in your mouth, Drew.

Yes, the narrative is written in dialect. Andy is undereducated and his language skills are lacking. That, mixed with the slanguage, made me dizzy. I had to forcefully put away the formal grammar-girl in me in order to read this story. I don’t normally like dialect, but I am not opposed to it if done properly. Hell, I read Trainspotting and Naked Lunch, and in this case, Mr. Aras kept true to his character, which is all I ask for: authenticity. However, I didn’t like being called “dude” every five minutes; that got stale quickly. As far as the aesthetics, the cover art and title are spot on, beautifully done. I giggled a bit at the title because I know a few grandmas who did the same thing with their sugar bowls. The interior layout is above average: I noticed only one minor formatting issue, one most people won’t notice at all, and my only pet peeve about the writing itself, and this is minor, was with the reference dropping. We can assume that this book is going to appeal mainly to twenty and thirty something men of the male angst Gen X and Y variety. Yes, they would probably get the references, but I feel that reference dropping limits readership and also dates a story. Not to mention that if the reader doesn’t “get” the reference, they instantly disconnect. That is not a good thing. When a reader disconnects, you’ve lost them. This book isn’t, in my opinion, an intense social satire like American Psycho, which spoke to a very specific time period in American Cultural History. No, this is not that sort of book. This is also not one of those: Hey dude, I went here and did that, smoked this and fucked that ... and then I did it all again. No, it’s definitely not that sort of story, either. Thank goodness. This book is more of a psychological character study, a philosophical issue story if you will, and stripping away the irrelevant references would allow for a broader appeal that could span many generations and cultures.

Overall, I loved it. The story flows smoothly, the plotline is flawless, and the imagery is restrained and innocent in its beauty. The prose is tactile and at times even poetic. The main characters are painfully tragic, and so we can laugh, cry, be horrified and be mortally wounded all at the same time. Shakespeare would be proud. This goes in my top picks for the year so far. This is definitely my kind of literature. Those who like tragic black comedy will adore this book. Those who want psychological realism and those who want to look a little deeper into the psyche of deviant and damaged characters will love its masterful subtlety. Bravo! I can’t wait to read more from this author.

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was a lot of fun, picaresque, adventuresome, sexy, poignant fun. The narrative voice reminded me a little of Silver Linings Playbook. Rollicking and sensitive at once.

[LAURI CRUMLEY COATES · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in a most unusual style; I found this book to be a real winner. The author, writing as our narrator and hero, Andrew Nowak, uses the language (profanity and poor grammar) that we would expect from a stoner and aimless drifter. I thought that was a great touch, although it did make it a bit more difficult at first. It just took me a little time to get into the style of the writing, but once I did, it added realism and a certain sort of grace to the story and the character.

Our hero, Andrew, is a down on his luck pot smoker and dealer, with the dysfunctional family that tends to go along with that lifestyle. I really loved the character of his Grandma, and actually enjoyed his Mom, who would be great on either the Jerry Sprenger show or an episode of Maury. I can enjoy characters without liking them, personally. However, I know some readers have a difficult time with characters that seem unlikeable. That may lead some people to have objections to the storyline. I would recommend they try to look past that, because the tale here is a gem.

Andrew mets up with a beautiful woman in a laundromat, where he waiting for his "connection" to arrive. His appointed purchaser is running late, and he and Audra, the woman strike up a conversation. She makes him an interesting proposition, and Andrew goes home with her for a little bit of boy-toy prostitution. She's beautiful, mysterious and wealthy. Needless to say, our hero falls for her in a big way. She's come to this country from Lithuania, as a mail order bride. When she takes off for her country of birth, Andrew is heartbroken. Using the logic only a stoner/idiot would have, he decides to come up with the money to follow her, and win her undying love.

Of course, Andrew hasn't thought this through very well. Upon his arrival in her hometown of Vilnuis, he realizes that he hasn't a clue how to find her, much less win her back. He finds a cheap place to stay, and decides to try his hand at detective work. He finds a bar and new friends to get high with; and through a comedy of errors manages to hook up with his beloved Audra.

Away from the stablizing forces of her husband and life in the US, Audra has returned to her real self-narcisistic, self absorbed, and spiraling out of control. Andrew finally realizes this, after numerous strange and weird, sometimes sad and alternately hilarious twists and turns. He decides to return to America, but needs some cash. From there, things take even larger unexpected turns, and change his life in a way he could never have imagined.

I took some interesting insights into human nature from this tale. It illustrates the sadness and aimlessness of some lives, and the amazing transformation that falling in love with the proper person can bring to a messed up soul. A very unusual story, written in an entertaining and provocative manner. While this book will not suit everyone, I think many people, myself included, will enjoy the unexpected direction and oddball characters.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Drug user and part time dealer Andrew Nowak never expected anything unusual to happen to him the day he went to the laundry mat to sell some stuff. When the beautiful Audra walked in and asked for him by name (his dealer name anyways), he found that he couldn’t say no. He followed her where she wanted him to go, he did what she wanted him to do, then he couldn’t get his mind off her till he saw her again. Becoming friends, he ended up following her to her home town of Vilnius, Lithuania. Because he didn’t know exactly how to find her, he began by finding a place to stay, a place to drink, and people to hang out with (and do some drugs with). Finally tracking each other down, Drew watched as Audra spiraled out of her mind. She did a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, but it was more than that and after the death of her father, she lost it completely. Witnessing all this and more, Drew decided to go home - but that is not the end of this strange and unpredictable story.

Goodness, that was a difficult book for me to read. I really tried to like some of the characters, any of the characters (ok, I did like grandma - kind of), but I found them to all be written (best way to describe it ) too quickly, too much happened in too short of time - it just kept moving. There wasn’t much depth to any of them. Some of the characters had back stories, memories of the past or quick little tales of ‘how come’, but I found no way of connecting with any of them on any level. I have to point out that it had nothing to do with the complete submersion of cultural slang’s, the extreme use of profanity, the graphic sexual descriptions, or even the heavy drinking and drug use. This is suppose to be a fictional novel, it has the feel of a guy retelling the tale of the strangest couple of years of his life. The narrative is written in the same trash-talking crude vernacular that the main character (and nearly everyone else) speaks. While some places in this book show how misunderstandings or miscommunications can lead to the strangest situations, most of the book came across as a poor representation of some people and places in parts of both Illinois and Lithuania. While a persons mental state is usually a touchy subject, this book dove right in letting it show that, to some point, everyone has a mental limit for good or bad, it is there. This story did have an interesting concept, I enjoyed the quick trip to Lithuania (never been), the use of foreign languages, the accented pronunciation of names (Endee for Andy), and the dog. But, with the writer being an English teacher at a college level, I guess I was expecting - different.

[Mike Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a page-turning enjoyable book to read, or anyway it was for me. It's wild, racy, adventuruous, romantic, picaresque . . . a touch of Dostoevsky, say, if Raskolnikov were a community-college, working-class kid (named Andy) from Chicago suburbs who deals drugs and gets in trouble by losing his heart to a beautiful woman from Lithuania, who happens to be the girlfriend of a local small-time mobster. Well, that's just the setup.

He travels to Vilnius, ends up homeless on the streets, living with a dog he befriends, though they have virtually nothing to eat between them, sleeping under a bridge (across the Vilnius River, I think).

There's some wonderful, well described moments of night life in Vilnius, and outside of the urban setting, a sort of European hippie, stoned-soul picnic on the shore of the Baltic. Later, in the latter parts of the book, there's tragi-comic playing out of the story once Andy marries a musician and comes back to the states with her. It's emotionally complex, feels like real life with anguished unraveling and sorting out of a charged web of relationships.

The language is young, fresh, colloquial — including common vulgarisms that could be off-putting to some (such as a retired lit professor friend of mine) — but to me were sort of invigorating, dude, and made me feel that I'm more with it, hip, than I am. : ) And that was part of the fun.

[Robert Duffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twenty-year-old stoner Andy is propositioned by a beautiful Eastern European woman, Audra, in an Oak Park laundromat. It sets off a chain of events that lands the aimless charmer in Lithuania’s capital, where he initially loses everything except for Tepti, a mutt. Together they set out to track down Audra, but first must survive the partiers of Vilnius. Click for the full review. http://www.examiner.com/x-416-Chicago...

[Donna Carrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and spellbinding book! Gint Aras uses raw and believable narrative to unfold the story of his hapless hero, Andrew, a young man facing a seemingly hopeless future in an impoverished working class American town.

This is truly a memorable work. Written for the current reader, it reaches back to the classic literary method of asking more questions than it can hope to answer.

Every word is gilded, fitting into the gritty tale like pieces of a puzzle. The end result is well worth reading. What a discovery! Can't wait for Aras's next book...

[DelGal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story caught my interest in the beginning because of the "rough" language and main character who is basically an underachiever from a dysfunctional family who falls in love with the foreigner wife of one of his friends he supplies weed to. Although the reading became tedious at times, it was able to hold my interest and take me through a reckless journey all the way to the major ending.

[Ellen Cassedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoo! I am someone who has never finished a beer (unlike some), so this book was a wild ride for me. I was very moved by Andy, and super-impressed by how the author brings him to life so appealingly, with a believable and funny and compassionate voice. I’m in awe of all Gint Aras knows about human beings.

[Rasa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andy Nowak is one of the most interesting characters I've met in a while!