The Atlas of Remedies by Paul Jaskunas Review by Molly McGinnis

The Atlas of Remedies by Paul Jaskunas

Review by Molly McGinnis

Publisher: Stillhouse Press

Publication Date: March 1, 2024

ISBN: 9781945233241

Pages: 233

More Than Even God Can Know: On Paul Jaskunas’s The Atlas of Remedies

How many sacrifices would we be willing to make to protect the people we love? It’s a question many of us have at least considered in recent years. Would we stay inside for months on end, would we participate in a vaccine trial, would we care for an ailing – and perhaps contagious – relative or friend? Would we, like the family in Paul Jaskunas’s second novel, The Atlas of Remedies, leave our homeland behind to pursue a better life? Risk and reward take on life-or-death proportions in this story; Atlas has the markers of both a folktale and, appropriately, a turn-of-the-century social realist novel. The two have more in common than one might think. Irrational optimism and 19^th century grit, it turns out, are an intuitive match, and Jaskunas knows this.  

Atlas begins with two children, Ona and Lukas, in Russian-occupied Lithuania. It is 1901, and their mother, Karolina, has left them with their uncle while she attempts to establish herself in America. The novel darts back and forth between Karolina’s life in New York City and the lives of the children in Lithuania with each chapter, a form choice that mirrors the story’s many divisions. There is a natural symmetry to immigration narratives. To live as an immigrant is to divide one’s thoughts, if not one’s time, between two cultures. Jaskunas sets up such dichotomies only to show how quickly they can blur, reaching beyond the theme of immigration to the supposedly at-odds traits of creativity and practicality, and to paraphrase Sontag, the kingdoms of the healthy and the ill.

In America, Karolina straddles the borders of these two kingdoms. While the children eagerly await her letters (she has promised to bring them to America as soon as she can afford it), a different story is unfolding in New York City. Karolina works at a piano key factory and lives in a cramped flat with an assortment of roommates, including her cousin, Marija, whom she followed abroad. Marija has fallen ill with the grippe, the 19^th century term for influenza, and Karolina takes it upon herself to set off across the city in search of Lithuanian remedies to treat Marija, even as she herself begins to fall ill. The treatment, involving chamomile and elderberries, is from her collection of traditional cures, The Atlas of Remedies, which she has left overseas with the children.

As Karolina treks through the city, meeting a host of strangers who slip in and out of the plot, readers might be reminded of the double-meaning of Atlas – that is, the image of Atlas, the Greek god of endurance and strength, holding heaven and earth on his shoulders. Karolina, and not the book she’s left in Lithuania, is the real Atlas of remedies, taking on the weight of the world to help her family overcome occupation, poverty, and illness.

One of the problems with fleeing a country as a child, whether as an immigrant, a refugee, or like me, simply the daughter of expats, is that it can be difficult to imagine that country moving forward with you into the future. Sometimes that is because, quite literally, it hasn’t, due to infrastructure, failed policies, all the clicks and hums of decisions that so often stop progress in its tracks. Other times, though, it’s the solipsism of childhood that freezes it all and makes it impossible to imagine that a place lost to you has not been lost to everyone else.

Much of the language in the children’s chapters mirrors the narrative distance and descriptive lilt of a fairytale. The novel begins:

“One black dawn, in the winter of 1901, the children’s uncle rose to hunt. The boy, in bed, waited until he could no longer hear the sound of the man’s boots breaking the crust of snow in the yard.”

A description of the woods, a few pages later, further sets the scene:

“Tall pines with cinnamon-colored trunks held snow in their branches. Invisible creatures had inscribed the white forest floor with ink-like tracings.”

From here, the tone is set for these children – theirs is a world of danger, but also of wonder. The illustrations that accompany each chapter (drawn by Jaskunas’s own son, Lukas) add to the ambiance: the children, the dark woods, the mysterious strangers, the journeys through the night. They place us in the arms of another time.

In Atlas, the manipulation of time is key to Jaskunas’s sense of place. While Karolina’s journey through rushed and frenzied New York City takes a single day, the story of the children’s runaway quest through forests, monasteries, and Russian stables to reach their mother in America spans several weeks. Far from disorienting, this approach fits Karolina’s increasingly fevered state, and reverses the typical perceptions of time. For many of us, time moves slowly in childhood, and seems to accelerate as we age. There are few fixed roles, in general, here; one of Jaskunas’s messages is that the impulse to protect others can exist in anyone, even a child. The privilege of being protected, on the other hand, is harder to come by.

Some of the most beautiful moments in Atlas exist at the sentence level, attached to the characters’ thoughts about God. As Karolina continues her trek through the city, a journey that can feel slow and disorienting at times, but perhaps appropriately so, she wonders:

“Had she left something behind in the pews? A prayer left unuttered? A candle unlit? There were so many saints and angels, so many faces of God in the world that her mind could not come to an end of prayer.”

It’s a nod, perhaps, to the novel’s seemingly infinite cast of characters, many of whom appear briefly to assist or disrupt and then vanish into the crowd. And yet earthly things, like stories, do come to an end. The conclusion of Atlas arrives swiftly, but it is not unsatisfying. Dodging sentimentality, it arrives in a snap, a sleight of hand meant to guide our gaze toward the future. Jaskunas’s protagonists are people more devoted to mystery than to miracles, and against all odds, they navigate uncertainty with grace. At times, it can feel a bit challenging to connect to these characters – one might leave some scenes with the impression that a truth or two is being withheld.

On the other hand, what lofty expectations of interiority might we, as modern readers, bring to characters who are simply trying to survive? This story is a call for readers to keep an open mind and perhaps, even, to cultivate our own steely optimism. With Atlas, Jaskunas recalls one of the earliest incarnations of the American Dream; that the desire to live free from violence and in as many joyful directions as one can handle is a dream shared by many. Narratives of American immigrants are often tales distilled to streaks of daring, suffering, and reckless hope. Paul Jaskunas’s Atlas captures this spirit, helps us locate it within ourselves – and sets it free. 

Paul Jaskunas is the author of the novel Hidden, which received the Friends of American Writers Award, and of Mother Ship, a poetry chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He is also the co-creator of Drawing Lessons, a forthcoming artist book combining ekphrastic poetry and images by Warren Linn. His writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, including America Magazine, Tab, Presence, Potomac Review, and the New York Times. He is the founding editor of Full Bleed, a journal of art and literature published annually by the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he has taught literature and writing since 2008.

Molly McGinnis studied literature at American University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, CQ Researcher, CommonLit, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Journal of Clinical Oncology: Oncology Practice, and elsewhere. She is a graduate student at George Washington University and a reviewer at The Washington Independent Review of Books. 

12 June 2024