The Echo Trap, a collection of prose by Ales Paplauski, a writer from the Brest region, won the Uladzimir Kalesnik literary award in 2009. What the future holds for us, Great Madness or Great Aspiration? Ales Paplauski asks his readers without offering any other options. Obviously, the writer’s question comes from his heart, from his communication with God. All we are echoes of God. If time is an echo trap, everyone of us is time. Ales Paplauski wrote down in excellent Belarusian what the Almighty put into his heart. The Almighty used The Echo Trap to say: it is a stern path to Great Aspiration. As soon as people start seeking easy and shady ways, the echo gets trapped, time stops and uncertainty leads to treason. It happened more often than not in history. Therefore, the humankind has only one path – a happy pain of compassion with God. Paplauski expresses this fundamentally truthful idea in his novella.