Big Love by the self-deprecating and humorously misanthropic Slovak writer, Balla, is an anti-love love story in which the hapless protagonist fumbles around in the dark, imagining he knows what love is while perhaps the best relationship he will ever have slips from his clumsy grasp. This short novella is not only a sharp witted critique of contemporary post-socialist society in Slovakia, in the form of a fondly satirical take on its bureaucratic ineptness and literary pretensions, but it is also an endearing and all too recognizable romantic comedy of the kind that actually exists in real life more often than in the movies.
Our hero, Andrič, as is typical for Balla, is a thinly veiled version of the author himself—a writer at heart but a bureaucrat by day. Not unlike another absurdist author from the other side of what is now, once again, the Czech-Slovak divide. And like Kafka, his protagonists tend to exist in isolation, unable to communicate with or understand the world around them. In this case Andrič is trapped in such a strangely off base circle of reasoning about human nature and his own place within it that he routinely and consistently misconstrues his unnecessarily patient girlfriend’s cues until, of course, it is finally too late.
The first time Andrič sees Laura she is wearing a neck brace. She has been injured in a car accident. A strange impetuous for a budding attraction. A single mother with a young daughter, Laura seems to be everything he is not. She is boisterous, outgoing, physically active, responsible and capable of looking after herself and her child, even if it means being creative in seeking out opportunities and resources. It’s hard to imagine what she sees in Andrič. But somehow their relationship, albeit a long distance one, manages to survive for two years. She is, however, one of the least developed characters in the book, a function of how limited Andrič understanding of her truly is.
The supporting cast, if you like, is wonderful. In fact, it is these two unlikely, eccentric characters, who play well against the two aspects of Andrič’s life, the professional and the literary, and serve to challenge his limitations while furthering the overall satirical intent of the novel as a whole. Panza is his office mate and best friend. Unmarried, he lives with his sister, a fact that inspires a healthy amount of curiosity around the office. Even more than Andrič, he exists in isolation, formed and informed by his long bureaucratic career which has left him vacillating between paranoia and despondency. He exhibits a practiced form of engagement with the world that reflects his rejection of ordinary human interaction:
Panza is sitting, listening to Andrič and nodding, or rather, he’s not listening, only nodding, his eyes and his whole face make it clear that he doesn’t understand, and how could he, since he’s not listening, it’s not that he is stupid, he just can’t be bothered to listen, he’s had bad experiences in the past when he used to listen and got nothing in return, so now he professionally and routinely doesn’t listen, especially when a sentence begins in a complicated way.
Because how could such a sentence possibly end?
Panza, whose tendency to express panic about the state of affairs within the system to which he has dedicated his career and within which he should long been disavowed of any ideals or illusions of freedom promised by the collapse of Communism, fuels the younger Andrič’s own fears. And fascination. Together they are a misfit pair, with Panza consuming more of Andrič’s attentions than Laura even if it is, again, difficult to figure out if their bond is more than circumstantial, because they never seem to enjoy each other’s company. Or perhaps these are two men for whom enjoy and company are not natural counterparts.
By contrast, Laura’s mother Elvira, is a former school teacher with an apartment filled with books and a string of former husbands, one for any necessary anecdote or discussion point. An ethereal being who almost floats around the jumbled space she shares with her daughter and granddaughter, her disaffection with contemporary society comes from a different angle than Panza’s. Reading and everything associated with it seems, so far as Andrič can tell, to be the source of her particular melancholy, her “sadness beyond words.” She views her nation as a country of sleepwalkers, dulled into a state of semi-consciousness—a state which has extended to Slovak writers. She is especially harsh on them claiming they all, even the female writers, lack experience with women. Without experience, how can anyone write? But, as she says:
Fortunately, writers don’t exist anymore. Because to exist is to mean something. But they don’t mean anything. We should erase them from our diaries, we should stop phoning them on their name day. They are nobodies. Yet these nobodies haven’t even noticed.
As a writer himself, Andrič makes the mistake of equating his ability to create with some measure of accomplishment in his personal life, no matter how obvious the messages Laura is signalling should be. Over and over he fails to see that what he imagines is, at last, “big love”with Laura, is rapidly losing its hold on her. We only have the briefest glance into her side of the equation and she comes across as unconvinced of her love forAndrič as we are. Once she slips away, he is left to slowly realize that big love is sometimes measured by the space left in your heart and life once someone is gone. And, of course, by then it is too late. But even then, he salvages a perverse pleasure that he somehow found the words, although he cannot remember uttering them, that finally severed their relationship for good:
After Laura informed him about the termination of their relationship Andrič gradually began to swell up with a kind of absurd pride about the fact that he, too, was capable of using words, that his words had consequences – and this also applied to statements he couldn’t remember at all – but Laura refused to repeat those words of great significance and merely reminded him that he had uttered them in a wine cellar in Spišská Sobota.
Who else but Andrič would follow such reasoning?
For such a short book, Big Love offers a lot through the somewhat thick lens of its hapless protagonist. It is relentless in its critique of society, family, love and literature. Many of the references are specific to Slovak history and culture, but a lack of familiarity with the underlying intertextual content will not impair the enjoyment of this funny/tragic tale. Andrič, for all his tendency to overthink the emotions out of any reasonable situation is endearing, the humour is bitter, sarcastic and wise. Yet, as the ending nears, his own existential crisis deepens, lending more credence to that well-worn Kafka comparison.
Just released from Jantar Publishing, Big Love by Balla is translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood.
roughghosts 
An apartment filled with books, you say? It’s ridiculous, I know, but just a snippet of a characterization like that, about any character, side or main, yup…that’s sometimes all it takes to ignite my interest in a book. (And, then, sometimes I’m disappointed that the books don’t feature more widely in the story. Yes, I realize that’s unreasonable.)
This sounds like a writer I should know better. I like the quotation about sentences and their endings!
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This is the second of his books to be translated. I have the first but have yet to read. This one is really funny — the hero is so inept yet so likeable.
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