(It's taken me a while to build up to writing about Ričardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker, not out of any reluctance — quite the contrary: the piece of paper I have stuck in the middle of the book is filling up quickly with thoughts — but rather because I wanted to get this right. I'm only halfway through, but these initial impressions of the book have been jabbing me in the side and I just had to get them down before they grew so impatient they left me forever.)

Several years back, I took a train out to New Brunswick to see an exhibit at Rutgers University of post-war Soviet art from the Baltic states. I wandered the gallery, hearing murmurs of my favorite tongues, the round vowel-laden Estonian, the consonant-burdened Lithuanian, and its truncated sister, Latvian. The art on the walls spoke in various voices too — realist directness, abstract grunts.

I find it difficult to write or talk about art. It's like trying to translate a language that has more dimensions than I can confine into words. But I know what I'm drawn to, and on this particular day I was drawn — over and over again — to the same print on one of the walls, a lithograph by Ivars Poikāns entitled "Portrait with Ears and Necktie".

The little monster in a frame in the corner. That little piece of grotesque. (And here I think I mean grotesque in the literary sense, both repulsive and empathetic, like an eyeball with big ears and wearing a necktie should be.)

I wasn't shocked to be pulled in by such a bizarre little drawing. I sometimes think it's almost too disturbing that in spite of all the rainbow-and-sunshine moments I try to squeeze out of life, I'm mostly attracted to art and literature that is sinister, diabolic, twisted: Nicola Barker, Carroll's Jabberwocky, Bulgakov, Hieronymus Bosch, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor. The menageries in fantasy books. Unreal beings. My high school literary crushes were not on Mr Darcy, but the monsters: Enkidu, Hyde, Mary Shelley's poor thing.

As I began to read Vilnius Poker (aha! you see, I would get there eventually), the Poikāns drawing kept reentering my mind, and I couldn't shake the image of this Vytautas as an eye and ears, slinking through his city absorbing, processing, absorbing, processing. In his city disguise of hat and necktie. Drawing me in.

It wasn't just Poikāns who was affecting my reading, but Bosch too. And Kafka. Gavelis references each of these artists, both subtly and overtly. His Vilnius is drawn by Bosch, filled in at the (never-ending) edges by Kafka, Escher, and the rest. I'm still lost somewhere in this maze, either on an up-staircase or a down-one. I have yet to figure it out. But Poikāns stood out as a reference, as if both the artist and the author were cut from the same cloth. When the narrator's father sketches portraits of an old swamp hermit named Vasilis, I picture Poikāns at his easel.

But I get the impression that Vytautas is not the true grotesque in this book. He has too much at stake. He's too deeply philosophical. Instead he's surrounded by the grotesque, his city, this "kanuked" Vilnius, where monsters lurk around every corner, swamp creatures, disguised as Us, even though to Vytautas, they're so obviously Them.

You'd think it was only in Old Town that she could disappear, in league with the spirit of Vilnius itself. That spirit of the city intimidated me. All of Vilnius grew faint and muffled, all there was left of it was crooked, fly-stained little streets and dirty courtyards with white-washed toilet stalls. The city shrank into the narrow, decrepit buildings, into the realm of the ground-floor dives. In the courtyard passageways, I would be met by bandy-legged dogs and dirty chickens. The entire motley pack would furiously sniff me over. Dazed men staggered along the walls. Shrill women hung laundry on sooty clotheslines. In the squares, sullen groups guzzled the cheapest garbage wine out of bottles.

I know it sounds odd, but I'd like to visit this Vilnius. I once said that after visiting Prague, Kafka's work didn't seem as bizarre. It was as if the reality of Prague's winding cobblestone streets had turned The Castle into nonfiction. I imagine it would be much the same if I should visit Vilnius (if it's anything like Riga was many years ago, then no doubt). I might happen upon an empty church filled with crazed musicians entertaining a near-dead audience. Or a bandy-legged dog. Or an artist sketching a hermit. With one eye. Two big ears.

And a necktie.