The main actor and narrator is a discarded, washed-out man, a hopeless alcoholic and a tattered student. He’s not the first in the literature of the world, and one aspect of his particularly brings Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov to mind-namely, that like that other searcher, he is a human-metaphor, depicting a human as a loving creature in the tragical existential-crisis world it falls to him to live in. This hero and his loved one, Tūla, not only live in that world, but personalize it, turning, through the human metaphor, into its direct children … the entire book, all of the events, the hero’s wanderings, separations, and short encounters with Tūla, is really only the boundless hunger of the soul, transformed by an agony of longing into things, birds, beasts, blossoms, and a vision of the loved one. (Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Metmenys)