Novel
The Cage
Būris
Alberts Bels · 1972
Synopsis
The architect Edmunds Bērzs, a married and well-established man, vanishes without a trace. Inspector Valdis Strūga, of the missing persons squad of the Riga militia, who himself dreams of vanishing, is given the task of finding him; the investigation takes him to the missing man's wife, employer and colleagues, and little by little he gets to know this ordinary man. Bērzs, meanwhile, is locked in a horse cage deep in a forest by Kārlis Dindāns, driven by an inexplicable jealousy, and there he takes stock of his life.
Context
Liesma published the book in Riga in 1972. Translated into Estonian as early as 1974, and into Finnish and Czech in 1976, it appeared in English from Peter Owen in 1990 under the title The Cage, in a translation by Ojārs Krātiņš, then in Spanish in 2023 under the title La jaula. Publishers Weekly notes parallels between the hunter and the hunted, and a reader quoted by literatura.lv compares it to Kafka's The Trial. Latvian Literature reads in it the problem of the cage that man carries within himself and of the cage of society.
Who it is for
A detective plot that reads easily and opens onto a reflection on the confinement of each of us.
Prizes and reception
Translated into several languages, from Estonian to Spanish, and adapted for the screen in 1993, twenty-one years after its publication.
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