Tag: Czech

If all happy families are alike, each strange family is strange in its own way: Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal

The novel begins with a wedding.

Alice and Maximilian exchanged rings and kisses, and signed a document confirming that the state of matrimony was primarily a contractual arrangement, which at the moment was of course the last thing on the newlyweds’ minds. After the ceremony, the priest invited the wedding party to the sacristy. Now, whether they liked it or not, Alice and Maximilian were on their own in the world. They answered everyone’s questions,  chatting about the declining quality of sacramental wine under the communist regime. Alice joked and laughed with her friends, while Maximilian drank a toast with  a bottle of slivovice, which, as usual on occasions like these, somebody suddenly seemed to pull out of nowhere, but through it all the metallic lace of their new situation slowly began to envelop them, closing in on them, fragment by fragment. Slit by slit the lacework net descended on them, enveloping them, protecting them, sealing them off.

Actually, there will be two weddings, because only the civil service later in Prague can be recognized by the law. But in the time between the two ceremonies, the couple and their friends and families gather in Alice’s parents’ apartment where her father’s friend, Dr. Antonin Lukavský, has a surprise in store. He has commissioned the eccentric pastry chef Marek Svoboda (who we will soon learn is also the doctor’s patient at the psychiatric hospital where he works) to prepare a cake for the festivities. And what a cake it turns out to be—an elaborate three-tiered marzipan castle of mythic proportions depicting, from top to bottom, the heavenly heights, the earthly realm, and a rich chocolate hell. So although it may be billed as a family sage, it’s clear from the start that  Tomáš Zmeškal’s Love Letter in Cuneiform will be anything but ordinary.

For one thing, Alice and Maximilian’s marriage is not the central focus and the “metallic lace” enveloping their new marriage does not prove very resilient because, after the birth of their son Kryštof, it unravels quickly. Rather, it is the marriage of Alice’s parents, Josef and Květa which runs the course of the novel, from the end of the second world war through to the early years of the 1990s, even if they themselves are separated and then estranged for most of those years. Love is a complicated affair for all, it seems. Meanwhile, as the family drama unfolds in a strange and sometimes disturbing fashion, Svoboda the pastry chef regales his doctor with fantastic visions that span both time and space. The result is an ambitious, layered work that is by turns tragic, philosophical, and absurd.

Zmeškal was born in Prague in 1966 to a Czech mother and a Congolese father. In 1987, he was granted permission to leave Czechoslovakia and travel to London, but when the Iron Curtain fell two years later, he chose to stay on in the UK to study English language and literature. Finally, in 1998, he decided to resettle in his home town where he soon began work on what would become his first novel. Following a lengthy search for a publisher, Love Letter in Cuneiform was finally released to widespread acclaim in 2008, with an English translation by Alex Zucker following in 2016. As Zucker notes in his Afterword, original reviewers responded to this unique, award-winning novel with efforts to place Zmeškal within the context of Czech post-Velvet Revolution literature. But that might be too limiting. Zucker argues that it also makes sense to look beyond the boundaries of the author’s homeland as well, indicating that Love Letter’s distinct labyrinthian construction and mythogenic qualities call to mind Borges, whereas an underlying “paranoia and slippery identity” may even suggest Philip K. Dick. It is, to be fair, a work that defies attempts at simple summaries, and is, in fact, perhaps better approached without an overly detailed road map.

The love story of structural engineer Josef Černý, lover of classical music and passionate devotee of the slide rule, and his wife Květa may be the central thrust of the novel, but the narrative does not proceed chronologically. Rather, it unfolds in fragmented pieces with shifting styles, forms, and voices. Letters of varied types, including a formal appeal to authorities to address a past crimes and lengthy romantic plea in cuneiform script, take up some of the key aspects of the story, while a forged letter does irreparable damage. But this is no epistolatory novel—the letters form only part of the picture and go only one way—nor does it confine itself to Josef, Květa, their daughter, grandson, and a few friends and extended family members. There is also the side story of the pastry chef, the most eccentric character in a cast of idiosyncratic individuals who not only terrifies a would-be thief with his bizarre marzipan creations, but entertains the good doctor with his detailed psychotic visions. He tells of a strange, manipulated existence in the Arizona desert, a journey to ancient Persia, and the assignment to repair a mysterious device in a Prague hundreds of years in the future. By bending expected storytelling conventions, vastly expanding the time scale, and playing with genre, Zmeškal crafts a tale that is not only heartbreaking and human, but that opens up plenty of space for questions of good and evil, immortality and death, belief and atheism, and of course, the endurability of love.

Josef first met Květa when he and his friend Hynek Jánský were at University during the war. Both men took a liking to her, but she chose Josef. Then, in the early years of their love affair, Josef was introduced to cuneiform through an odd coincidence. He learned in a class that his birthday, November 24, 1915, corresponded exactly with the date that Czech orientalist and linguist Bedřich Hrozný announced to a meeting of the German Oriental Society that he had deciphered the language of the ancient Hittites, a people who lived in Anatolia (present day Turkey and Syria) three thousand years ago. This sparks his interest in the curious wedge shaped script that originated in Mesopotamia but was adapted by other cultures, and the idea of solving the riddle of a previously unknown language. When he shares it with Květa, she tells him she is certain he could do the same. “She had a better imagination than I did,” he confesses, “she always has, and over time I learned not to oppose her using logical arguments and facts.” So it becomes his secret mission to crack some as yet untranslated language.  Or at least learn to read cuneiform.

Josef and Květa marry after the war ends and welcome Alice, their first (and only) child, in 1950. But their old friend Hynek soon plots his revenge. The communist government has taken advantage of his “talents” of persuasion and punishment, and promoted him accordingly. He arranges for Josef’s arrest and ultimate imprisonment on obscure charges. As a result, Josef will be gone for the first ten years of his daughter’s life. Uncertain what to do, Květa turns to Hynek hoping he will help her free her husband and thus begins one of the most deeply disturbing aspects of the book—a prolonged and brutal relationship that, when it is later exposed, will drive Josef and Květa  to part shortly after Alice’s wedding. Alice stays in her family apartment to raise her son after her own marriage ends , Josef spends most of his time at the rural house where he grew up, and Květa moves in with her aging Aunt Anna, an outspoken spinster with an opinion on everything. And life goes on, fraught with heartbreak, misunderstandings, and stubborn resolve. Alice is caught between her parents, while Josef forges an increasingly deep bond with his grandson. Finally, the Iron Curtain falls and a newly independent nation and its citizens are left to find their bearings in a world of new possibilities.

Some reviewers of the translated text have suggested that the novel loses its intensity in its later chapters, but it is perhaps more accurate to describe what occurs as a change in tone as threads of the story begin to converge. The central characters—Josef, Květa, Alice, and the seemingly indestructible Aunt Anna are all getting older. Kryštof, now an adult, has become accustomed to the countryside where he has spent so much time and has set his sights on marriage to a girl his grandfather insists on calling “the blonde.” But into the mix comes a distant cousin,  Jíří (or George), a young man of Czech heritage, related to Aunt Anna but born abroad and raised in England, who arrives to experience his ancestral homeland now that the Iron Curtain has fallen. He stays with Alice and works in the city, but his regular letters to his sister offer his impressions of their ancestral nation and its peculiarities (not to mention the oddities of their relatives) often revealing more of the evolution of Czech society and the transition from communism to capitalism than he realizes. This is yet another layer that Zmeškal deftly weaves into his broader narrative tapestry.

Love Letter in Cuneiform is a novel that challenges and exceeds the norms of a multigenerational family saga at every opportunity. Josef and Květa’s love story has a grand, tragic arc to it that mirrors the kind of conditions—unfaithfulness, cruelty, misunderstanding, separation, failed attempts at reconciliation—that often tear lovers apart in mythological traditions. In an interview with Words Without Borders, Zmeškal confides: “I love old stories and myths, and I think that whatever changes in the world, we still live similar lives, though in different circumstances, of course.” That spirit comes through. This is a novel that is on one level very much bound to the history and politics of Czechoslovakia (as it was known from 1918 through 1992) through the second half of the twentieth century, while, on another level, it is a larger-than-life and often very funny tale of love, loss, wisdom, madness, and evil—though not necessarily in that order. Throughout, its unique energy is sustained in translation with Zucker’s careful, and at times creative, attention to the subtleties and playfulness of Zmeškal’s language.

Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal is translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Yale University Press.

Dream follows dream: Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

Drink them up, swallow those clouds, gulp them down with all your might, because all you’ve got to look forward to now are ceilings.

As Ema, the fifty year-old protagonist of Zuzana Brabcová’s Ceilings, takes in her last view of the overcast skies over Prague before the ambulance attendant leads her into the Addiction Treatment Centre of the hospital, she knows that it will be months before she  sees them again—except, of course, in the strange, troubled, and fantastic dreams and psychotic episodes that will accompany her through the trials of detox. She’s been here before and is well aware of what lies ahead.

The daughter of two literary historians, Brabcová (1959–2015) was born in Prague. Under the Communist regime, she was denied the right to attend university so she worked as a librarian, a hospital attendant and a cleaner. Following the Velvet Revolution, she worked as an editor. Her first novel Far from the Tree, initially published abroad in 1987, won the inaugural Jiří Orten Prize. Ceilings (2012), recently released in Tereza Veverka Novická’s powerful English translation, was her fourth novel, a vivid, hypnotic account of one woman’s transit through drug rehab that clearly illustrates why she has been rightfully compared to Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn (whose artwork graces the cover).

As soon as Ema enters the hospital, The Garden as it is known, she finds herself in a world that operates on its own set of rules and regulations. The clock is now set to institutional time, where order attempts to define but can never fully contain either the camaraderie or conflicts between an eccentric collection of women—druggie or alkie?—caught in an ever-swirling cascade of medications and madness. For Ema, navigating the neuroses and idiosyncrasies of her fellow inmates is as challenging as navigating her own, as delusions, paranoias, and troubled memories blur the fragile boundaries between reality and dream, external and internal existence.

This fluidity is reflected in a polyphonic narrative which moves smoothly between third and first person, often pulling in and out of Ema’s head in a single paragraph. Add to this, asides in second person, where Ema either addresses herself or directs her thoughts to her daughter Rybka, her lesbian partner Dita, or other family members. Finally, there is a second first person narrator, Ema’s brother—a “twin” although they were born one year apart—not an alter ego, but a distinct male gendered self. Ash. He emerges at an early age, perhaps to serve as a shield against the uncertain and frightening world both inside and outside the home, and inside and outside Ema’s own unstable emotional space. Ash comes into his own when they are very young, realizing he is different:

I said to myself this secret of mine must be something like chickenpox; okay, in that case an autovaccine was needed to reduce the most visible traces to a minimum. So I decided to become a normal little boy, if that’s what they wanted: I’d fight over toys in the sandbox and might even pee my pants in a temper tantrum, and I’d clap and giggle over my birthday cake; all this could be learned by observing other children. I methodically began to appropriate the behaviour of others, their expressions, emotions, and gestures, and chose from this panoply the ones I considered useful, purposefully aping them. It was glorious: one by one, every sensation sunk into the hollowed-out nutshell of nothingness.

My rebirth every morning soon became routine, and I put on my face like a prothesis.

Ema and Ash are not exactly like two manifestations of  a dissociative condition, nor do they represent a typical binary gender identity. Ema takes comfort in Ash’s existence, while he is both protective of and frustrated with his “sister,” yet cognizant of his own unreality, of the fact that he was not born and cannot die.

Confined to the hospital, Ema is forced to contend with various difficult personalities, while finding her place and forging alliances among the other patients and the nursing staff. Reality can be an anxious state. Meanwhile, dreams and episodes of delirium carry her back into her (or Ash’s) past, but the scenes are strange, distorted, and disturbing.  And she is haunted not only in her restless sleep; the ceilings that hang that above her are a constant reminder that she is trapped:

It’s come back after my body expelled, at least to some extent, the poisons that were competing with it. I’m in a room, I need to get out, I rise to the ceiling. I tear though it, really easily, because the walls and ceiling are made of cardboard, and I find myself in another room.  I escape through a chink into another room and so on and so forth, again and again, one room replaces another, always the ceiling, never the sky. But what if it’s not the dream that’s come back to me, but it’s me who’s come back to it? Maybe the waking life of Ema Černá is merely a sequence of pauses, brief interruptions of flight with no beginning and no end.

Ema’s dilemma, her inability to successfully integrate her internal and external reality, reflecting a lifetime of emotional and mental health challenges mediated by substance abuse, is the driving force of this intense, vulnerable, and moving novel, one that draws on Brabacová’s own experiences, including time in psychiatric rehab (and, one might imagine, the perspective afforded through her work as a hospital orderly). Its raw, unapologetic narrative slips seamlessly between voice and perspective, continually cross-referencing itself, to create a world—one woman’s world, past and present—that for all its surreal elements is cohesive, sympathetic and real.

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová is translated from the Czech by Tereza Veverka Novická and published by Twisted Spoon Press.

“Mad, it’s all mad” Winterberg’s Last Journey by Jaroslav Rudiš

‘The Battle of Königgrätz doesn’t just run through my heart, it also runs through my head, and through my brain, and through my lungs and liver and stomach, it’s part of my body and soul. Two of my ancestors lost their lives, dear Herr Kraus, one on the side of the Prussians, and the other on the side of the Austrians, Julius Ewald and Karl Strohbac, yes, yes, I can seek out either side, but in the end I’m laying with both of them in the grave, I don’t know if you can imagine that, I want to understand it, I want to finally understand everything in my life, you understand, dear Herr Kraus, that’s why we’re here now, in order to understand it, dear Herr Kraus, here at Königgrätz was where the entire tragedy began,’ rambled Winterberg, still looking out of the window.

Just a few pages into the madcap epic adventure Winterberg’s Last Journey it’s immediately clear that the erstwhile hero of the story, ninety-nine year old Wenzel Winterberg, is quite the character. He is not only possessed by history, obsessed with railways, and haunted by the memory of a long lost love, but he is determined to exhaust an unexpected death bed second wind with a wintery escapade guided by his precious bible, the Baedeker for Austria-Hungary from 1913—the final edition of the railway travel guide published five years before he was born. His reluctant companion is Jan Kraus, a palliative nurse hired as live-in caregiver to usher the old man on his final passage to the other side, who now finds himself struggling to keep up with his near-centenarian “patient” for Kraus is also carrying plenty of his own baggage on this Central European odyssey.

Czech writer, playwright and musician Jaroslav Rudiš is clearly having fun with this eccentric tragicomedy, but he is also exploring the complicated history of his homeland. As his first novel originally written in German, Winterberg’s Last Journey is centred around two men who have left what is now Czechia and settled in Berlin. Winterberg is an ethnic German, born in Reichenberg (now Liberec) in 1918, just as Czechoslovakia declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. This liberation allowed his father to open the first crematorium—or as Winterberg calls it Feuerhalle— in the newly formed country. Seemingly proud of the family business and his father’s extensive experience with a variety of unfortunate corpses, he did not want to follow in his footsteps. After the war he left for Berlin where he resumed the trade he’d first undertaken in Reichenberg, thus spending the rest of his working life as tram driver.

Kraus, by contrast, is an ethnic Czech who grew up in the southern area of the country during the Communist post-war era. He too was eager to leave as young man, but what he thought was his ticket out landed him in prison. After his release he trained as a nurse and joined some kind of informal network of caregivers who provide comfort, companionship and live-in support for those who are dying. Upon meeting Winterberg, he is certain the “crossing,” as he calls it, will be swift. The old man does not seem long for the world. But when Kraus happens to remark to the unconscious patient that he is from Vimpek, the town known in German as “Winterberg,” something starts to percolate and before long he is piloting a remarkable return from the nearly-dead. As Winterberg regains his strength and his faculties, he begins to hatch a plan to follow the trail of postcards left by his first great love—Lenka Morgenstern—when she was forced to flee as the tides were turning in the Sudentenland region prior to the Second World War. He is convinced that if he can make it to Sarajevo, the location of her final missive, he will find out what happened to her so many long years ago.

The strength of this unlikely voyage lies in the chemistry, if that’s the right word, between this Bohemian odd couple. Winterberg is subject to rambling and very loud readings from his precious Baedeker, much to the dismay of anyone in earshot including  his weary companion. For long stretches he carries on one-sided conversations, providing questions and commentary as needed (“I know what you’re going to say, Herr Kraus…”) leaving Kraus himself barely able to get a word in edgewise. He has stock phrases to which he constantly returns, like “the beautiful landscape of battlefields, cemeteries and ruins,”  the adage of an Englishman he once knew, and a seemingly endless repertoire of all the possible corpses that “are not a pretty sight, as my father would say.” He’s also subject to “historical fits,” extended passionate, agitated soliloquies that always end with a sudden collapse into sleep:

Cork pulled.

Air out.

Eyes closed.

Good night.

As narrator and reluctant participant, Kraus is the dramatic foil. He falls into spare, sometimes almost desperate,  reflections against the deluge of Winteberg’s ravings, and their dialogue, when they are able to find the space for it, is funny and tight. But he is, in his way, no less damaged than the self-described mad man in his care. He drinks too much, smokes too much, and is weighed down by secrets and a lost love of his own. In the end, each man is searching to understand something about himself and his life, and charting his own personal battles, those events large and small that threaten to derail us all. And along the way, through railway stations, museums, cemeteries, and a handful of countries, we learn a lot about the history of Central Europe and the network of rail lines that have bound it all together.

Winterberg’s Last Journey is an ambitious and wide-ranging outing—one that depends on strong characterizations, a balanced narrative energy, a careful distribution of the ongoing repeated expressions and internal jokes, and a few unexpected twists and turns to shift the flow of what could easily fall into a tired routine in less talented hands. And, as Kris Best tells us in her Introduction to this novel, her impressive first translation, Rudiš draws heavily on factual details to recreate the world Winterberg remembers from the 1920s and 30s, right down to the Fuerehalle in Reichenberg.  The result is a highly engaging adventure with both historical depth and comic breadth.

Winterberg’s Last Journey by Jaroslav Rudiš is translated from the German by Kris Best and published by Jantar Publishing. It is available now in the UK and worldwide from the publisher. It will be published in North America in September.

Journey into the distant past: Newton’s Brain by Jakub Arbes

G. Wells’ first novel The Time Machine, published in 1895, has long been considered not only one of the earliest works of science fiction, but the popularizer of the notion of time travel. It was a concept Wells had explored in short fiction some seven years earlier, but in 1877, a full eighteen years before his landmark novel was released, a Czech writer and intellectual named Jakub Arbes (1840–1914) had already depicted a machine designed to peer into times distant in Newton’s Brain, a very short novel the author described as a “romanetto.” Now, as part of their new Historical Science Fiction series, Jantar Publishing has issued this underappreciated text in a new translation by David Short, complete with a fascinating introduction by Peter Zusi (as a note of interest, the earlier 1892 translation by Josef Jiří Král is available from Sublunary Editions).

As Zusi indicates in his introduction, time travel narratives were rather popular in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, but ghosts and supernatural influences were typically called upon to explain a protagonist’s encounter with past or future events. The time machine, by contrast, depends on scientific reasoning to lend a degree of credibility to the premise that one might disrupt normal chronological progress. For Arbes, Zusi suggests a very likely inspiration for the particular idea of time travel that underpins his story. In 1846, a small pamphlet called The Stars and the Earth; Or, Thoughts Upon Space, Time and Eternity was published in London and became a sensation. The work, attributed to Felix Eberty (1812–1884), a Berlin-born lawyer, author and amateur astronomer, is thought to have influenced Kafka and Einstein. It seems quite possible Arbes would have read it as well. Eberty takes the already accepted notion that the light we see from faraway stars has travelled a long distance so to look into the night sky is to look into the past, and argues that if one could travel sufficiently far from the earth, it would be possible to view our planet’s past, including all of human history. Arbes presents a similar notion, one that, for both men, assumes the ability to travel faster than the speed of light and the existence of a device powerful enough to permit the observation of small details over vast distances. Charming to today’s reader perhaps, but not implausible to nineteenth century audiences. And, Zusi points out that although Arbes takes more literary license in his work, he is actually more aligned a modern scientific perspective than Eberty whose goal was a greater understanding of God’s omniscience and thus limited to a Biblical timescale. Arbes’ universe is 30 million years old and, at least in this book, his view of human nature and progress rejects all mythological constructs.  However, specific scientific considerations aside, the primary stylistic influence on the tale that unfolds in Newton’s Brain lies in the gothic mystery and macabre spirit of Edgar Allen Poe.

The narrator invites his reader to the “whimsical” tale he plans to tell from the allegorical graveside of a man whom he insists would have welcomed release from the sorrow and distress that troubles the human soul—a man who would not have wanted to be mourned:

The man of whom I speak was my friend from earliest childhood, and he died – or more properly fell – at the Battle of Sadowa as an officer in the Prince Constantine infantry regiment. His skull had been split in two by a Prussian pallasch…

This friend was the handsome son of the head gardener for the wealthy Kinsky family in Prague, while he, the narrator, was, by comparison, poorer and “hideous,” but the two young men had been close since boyhood. Both exhibited a lively enthusiasm for exploration and debate when they were young, and eventually they were each drawn to the sciences. However, being the plainer of the two, the narrator “leaned towards dreary, tedious and rarely amusing mathematics,” while his dashing companion pursued the more exciting natural sciences. Yet, his friend not only studied physics, chemistry, and mechanics, he collected and poured through volumes of arcane and obscure philosophical works as well—all with one singular objective: to master the art of illusion. He is, in fact, so obsessed that his formal studies suffer, a circumstance that ultimately causes his family, who know nothing of his passion for magic, to insist he enlist in the army.

Before leaving to join his regiment, the newly enlisted soldier collected all of the books and equipment he had purchased over the years and stored in the narrator’s room and had it carried away. Soon he is called into active service and their once inseparable friendship falls victim to the distance of time and space. Several years pass before the narrator hears from his friend again. Two letters arrive, the second containing an odd request to be fulfilled should he die. If his wishes are followed, his friend writes, they will see one another one more time.

Soon after, war is declared between Prussia and Austria. The next notice to reach the narrator is a letter from the parish priest in the town of Nechanitz, to inform him that a critically injured, unidentified young man has been brought in to his care. A letter found in the soldier’s uniform bearing our protagonist’s address was the only means by which they could track down his identity.  The narrator travels to the town, recognizes his friend and is there to witness his burial. He returns to Prague devastated by the loss. In his grief, he resumes his once abandoned studies, now focusing his attention on applied mathematics and astronomy. But, of course, this is not the end of the story.

One night, the narrator’s friend appears at his door:

Without uttering a word, my friend stood there, motionless, while I was unable to tear my gaze from him.

His face was deathly pale, but his clear, blue eyes radiated life and a light, amiable smile played upon his lips.

“Good evening,” he said after a while and took several steps forward.

Catching the clink of a sabre I registered that he was wearing an officer’s uniform.

His friend insists that he escaped death, that the fallen soldier was another man altogether, and now, that very evening, he is hosting an event at the Kinsky chateau to which all of their friends have been invited. He must hurry back but invites the narrator to come as soon as he is able.

The evening at the chateau is strange, marked by elaborate illusions, the incredible assertion by returned or seemingly resurrected soldier that he has procured the brain of Isaac Newton and had it installed in his own skull, and a long speech to a room filled with officials, academics and theologians in which he systematically critiques modern society and tears apart the so-called advances of human knowledge and technology. Finally, he reveals the existence of a driver, realized with the assistance of the wisdom contained in Newton’s grey matter, that will allow him to travel back in time to observe selected moments from human history. Is this perhaps the greatest invention ever, or the most sophisticated deception?

Arbes’ narrative is moody and atmospheric, his narrator alert to his own emotional and psychological state. As he tells his tale, there is much room for speculation woven in the account. Cleverly, Arbes makes his time machine inventor a young man with an eccentric enthusiasm for magic, sleight-of-hand and a vast range of scientific and philosophical knowledge, practical and arcane alike. This allows for possible interpretations, closing none entirely. It is also an often biting commentary on religion, politics, education and, in particular, man’s capacity for violence. The Time Machine may be better known today, but while Newton’s Brain’s inventive hero sets his sights back to the very origins of human community and Well’s time traveller takes a journey into the incredibly far flung future manifestations of humanity, both men were skeptical about the promises of technology and the evolutionary potential of humankind.

Newton’s Brain by Jakub Arbes is translated from the Czech by David Short with an introduction by Peter Zusi. This attractively illustrated and generously annotated edition is published by Jantar Publishing. It is available in the UK now and will be out in North America next month.

Out of the never-ending flow of stories: Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz

“Little did he know—or maybe he refused to acknowledge—that there are no pure story streams; all stories are scary, all come from a single strange-smelling wellspring that seeps into the folds of things and collects in dirty corners of the spaces we inhabit, all trace patterns of desire and fear that aren’t even ours but those of a monster whose dream is our life.”

Here’s a story that starts innocently enough, like so many stories before it, with a murder—no, make that two. Of course, that’s too simple. No murder mystery, if you’re expecting a story that will attempt to reach some kind of conclusion, an explanation, starts with the act itself alone; it begins somewhere else, somewhere back where the story really begins… But here’s a warning: this is a murder mystery that will wind its way through more than a few wildly unlikely stories on the way from execution to explanation.

To be honest, I signed up for the adventure that is Michal Ajvaz’s Journey to the South without any clear expectation about what might lie in wait for me. If you come to this 2003 novel, newly translated by Andrew Oakland, with previous experience with the Czech author’s idiosyncratic approach to postmodern fiction, you will likely be prepared to simply strap yourself in for an improbable, endlessly discursive, multi-layered excursion into the heart of what it means tell stories at all. If you’re new to his work, consider this an invitation to dive into the deep end—about six hundred pages deep, give or take.

The novel opens in the isolated village of Loutro on the south shore of Crete, where an unnamed narrator chances upon a young man, a Czech it would seem, with an unusual assortment of reading material. Overcome with curiosity, he decides to eschew his typical tendency to avoid engaging with fellow countrymen when abroad, and comment on the books. Thus begins a lengthy conversation that will extend over several evenings and countless glasses of wine and ouzo as Martin, a philosophy student working on a PhD thesis on Kant, shares the strangely convoluted tale of the circumstances that have led him to travel from Prague to Crete.

One evening some four months earlier, on his way home from the library, Martin had chanced upon a poster advertising a ballet based on The Critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant. The show was playing every Wednesday for two months and, this being a Wednesday, he headed to the theatre that very night. According to the program, the composer Tomáš Kantor was a writer with little published work who had “died tragically in Turkey in July or August 2006”—the summer before. As the show began, the young Kant scholar endeavoured to interpret the meaning and roles of the dancers onstage. To his surprise it really did begin to make sense to him. Certain dancers were clearly portraying sensory matter, others pure form, with a violet clad figure to represent Transcendental Apperception, that which we call “I.” Standing in the back, was a veiled mysterious figure that could only be Ding an sich—“The Thing in Itself” or the true status of objects which we cannot know. All was going well until the end of the second act when suddenly The Thing In Itself emerged from the shadows and began to move about, throwing off the dancers. The figure advanced to centre stage where it stopped, pulled out a pistol and shot straight into the audience, killing a man seated in the front row.

Martin, like everyone else in the theatre, is now witness to a murder. But before long he is even more deeply involved. The victim, it turns out, was a wealthy businessman, Petr Quas, and the step brother of the ballet’s composer, Tomáš Kantor. However, what captures Martin’s interest is the lovely red-headed woman he sees, first at the police station and again at the university. Drawn to her, he discovers that she is Kristyna, Tomáš’s ex-girlfriend who is still holding an inextinguishable torch for him since he abruptly broke up with her two months before his mysterious death. Smitten, he arranges to meet with her daily so she can tell him all about Tomáš on the pretence of wanting to understand if and how the two brothers’ death may be linked.

So, now we have Martin reporting what Kristyna told him about the unhappy childhoods of Tomáš and Petr, the former’s multiple attempts at creative expression that ultimately ended in darkness and despair, and the latter’s brief success as a poet. But where one brother finds his way from poetry into business, the other settles into a post as a transportation dispatcher at the end of the tram line. Then, one day, while off sick, a novel suddenly starts to take shape before Tomáš’s eyes, first as an empty city, then as a coastal town in an imagined nation complete with characters and strange occurrences. A series of events ultimately leads to the injury of his protagonist, Marius, who is taken to recover at the home of his lover’s grandparents  where he is told a story, second-hand, which in turn contains a novel—science fiction this time—and by this point the depth of stories within stories is running very deep, taking us to cities and countries, real and imaginary, across oceans and continents. However, when he finally winds his way to the end of his composition, the author is unsatisfied. Tomáš feels that his book, which had arisen out of nothing, has failed to correspond to the nothingness he carries inside:

“There was nothing so rich that it could be expressed merely by an endless proliferation of stories, a never-ending cascade of events in which other events spurted forth from every object, space, and gesture, then yet more events from the spaces, objects, and gestures of these. Tomáš felt that even the entire cosmos would be too little for the expression of nothing; a cosmos that expressed emptiness would have to be endless.”

His overarching novel then starts to mutate and grow, sending out tendrils, so to speak that branch off and flower in unexpected ways forming part of a network of signs and rebuses that Martin and Kristyna will follow as they eventually travel from Prague to Crete in search of Tomáš’s killer.

If Journey to the South sounds like a baggy monster of a book, well, it would be if Ajvaz didn’t have both feet firmly planted in the tell-don’t-show school of storytelling. The ungainly nest of narratives he constructs has its own internal cohesion and propulsive energy—no matter how strange or how far reaching—because at the end of the day, Martin is reporting it all to his audience, the narrator who interjects when he wants to clarify something and reminds us that we are actually at a quiet resort in Crete. And, of course, Martin himself is an active participant in the story he is relaying, driven by his attraction to Krystina if nothing else. Their fanciful journey through Europe from one unlikely—and strangely unravelling—clue to another is marked by their own doubts about the reasonableness of the entire enterprise. At one point, Martin even wonders if he has gotten caught up in a cheap Dan Brown novel, his own private Da Vinci Code. But this is a murder mystery and our amateur detectives do manage to make their way to an oddly satisfying conclusion. If, in fact the story actually ends when this book does…

Journey to the South is, then, classic Ajvaz territory. Structurally he favours the mise-en-abîme, the story with a story framework (fittingly, “placed into the abyss”), and delights in cliché genre tropes like car chases, monsters, cartoon villains and more. Woven into this are philosophical, scientific and theoretical references, often in unexpected contexts. I suspect that one will either welcome the kind of world he creates and his exploration of the possibility of reaching some semblance of truth (reality) in the stories we read and tell, or find his work hopelessly restricted to a game of limited scope and value. However, although he likes to keep his fiction separate from his theoretical work, like fellow Czech postmodern novelist Daniela Hodrova, Ajvaz is a respected literary critic and it is unlikely that his critical principles have not seeped into his fantastic storyscapes to some degree. (For a discussion of his academic work see David Vichnar’s essay on the Equus site.) Nonetheless, some critics have accused Ajvaz of repeatedly playing in the same sandbox, hauling out the same tired toys. Vichnar also answers this complaint cleverly:

What this wide-spread, if also reductive and simplifying, viewpoint fails to acknowledge is that Ajvaz’s fictional world leaves unresolved, and thus in perpetual motion and fruitful exchange, the dynamics of opposing principles which his thought strove to bring to a stasis of resolution. His fiction is, thus, bound to repeat itself, again and again, in all of his attempted re-writes of the impossible accounts of all the other cities, all the other intimations of pre-articulated fields, approachable in fiction only through linguistic articulation, and thus always already pre-fabricated. If this be the failure of Ajvaz’s fiction—a simple formula repeated ad nauseam without conclusive progress—then its saving grace, like that of Beckett’s, is its continuous effort to “fail better” – imaginatively, challengingly, and ultimately, enjoyably.

At the end of the day, I am hard pressed to express how effectively Ajvaz manages to pull off such a multi-layered, wildly entertaining feat of storytelling making it intelligent and thought provoking at the same time. It’s easy to lose track just how deeply embedded you are in the stories within stories (or even now to unwrap them to remember just who was telling what when), but somehow it works. It’s serious and absurd, sad and funny, cheesy and moving. So, although it may have been my first Ajvaz adventure, it won’t be my last.

Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz is translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland and will be published by Dalkey Archive Press on March 28, 2023.

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.

At the threshold: City of Torment (and Prague, I See a City…) by Daniela Hodrová

Founded, according to legend, with the prophetic proclamation of the mythical Princess Libuše, Prague rose from a hilltop settlement to become the political and economic hub of Central Europe. Forged in stone, blood and bone over a thousand years it is a place dense with history, a city that cannot escape itself, often depicted as a labyrinthine maze of magic, madness and despair. City of Torment, a loose trilogy by Czech author and theorist Daniela Hodrová, falls into the literary tradition of writers like Karel Hynek Mácha, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka in its portrayal of the city as a distorted space within which the individual can become lost or disoriented. Her Prague is a layered, cyclical place in which spatial and temporal dimensions shift, trapping its living and the ghostly inhabitants in a grand circle game, one that plays out again and again in a number of distinctive settings or “stages” throughout the city centre. As such, the narrative that runs through the course of the three novels that comprise City of Torment—In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta—is fragmented, kaleidoscopic and cumulative, peopled by characters that defy boundaries between life and death, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate.

There is no succinct way to provide an outline of City of Torment as a cohesive work of fiction; it is akin to an organic, evolving entity that gradually takes on a life that even seems to confound its own author by the time we reach the third part. It was not conceived as a trilogy. Hodrová began the first novel, In Both Kinds, in December 1977 and finished it the following year, but, like the two novels that would follow, it could not be published until after the fall of the Communist government. This work, narrated by an omniscient third person narrator that occasionally takes on the direct voice of a character or an object, is centred around an apartment block across from the famed Olšany Cemetery, and those who reside in or pass through in the building and the graveyard. It opens near the end of the Second World War, as young Alice Davidovich throws herself from the window of the building’s fifth floor flat to avoid being taken away to the gas chambers, thus making a direct transit from the building to the cemetery. Alice, who will spend much of her after-life repeating a fruitless rush to meet her beloved Pavel, is the central female protagonist in this first book, and provides a critical yet curious continuity linking the women at the heart of each of the following texts.

A wide cast of eccentric characters populate the pages of In Both Kinds. The living, the dead (recently and long dead), and the few who have found themselves charmed (or cursed) with the ability to negotiate a space in between the two states, exist alongside one another. Souls trapped inside inanimate objects, or transformed into birds interact on both sides (with both kinds) and, naturally, many characters will make the passage from the world of the living to the community of the dead over the course of the novel. Their personalities and the events or activities marking their lived existences follow them to their graves. Clothing and objects—a sweater, a coat, a mother of pearl button, a Persian lamb muff—become talismans, symbols (but of what?). And woven into all of this are historical personages and events that appear or are referenced, exaggerated or confined by the mythology that has grown around them over time. It is a strange and wonderful ensemble piece, but hanging over it all is a disquieting sense of directionlessness.

This sensation becomes more pronounced in the second novel, Puppets (Living Pictures), composed between 1981 and 1983. Composed of one hundred and twenty-six “living pictures” or vignettes, this novel focuses closely on Sophie Souslik, a seamstress at the Realm of Puppets, and her parents and grandparents. Prague with its warren of streets and public squares forms a wider backdrop against which the action—much of it imagined, remembered and echoed—is staged. And staged is the appropriate word, Prague has become a city of marionettes. But something darker lurks here. Specific spaces and objects, like the courtyard with its rug beating rack or Sophie’s father’s office with its heavy black furniture and spinning chair, hold special powers and seem to become portals to painful personal and historical pasts, hidden or forgotten. There is a significant and welcome crossover of characters from In Both Kinds as well as new characters that sometimes act as alternate versions of previous actors. For example, Sophie is sometimes mistaken, at least briefly, for Alice Davidovich, and she also has a boyfriend named Pavel. Identities are frequently confused, experiences are repeated merging the familiar with the strange, and characters increasingly begin to change—humans metamorphize into insects and birds, while statues and household objects fall in love with people and long for release from their solid states. Still, an atmosphere of detachment colours the text.

With the third and final novel, Theta, composed between December 1987 and January 1990, the project that will become City of Torment begins to take form (the books will ultimately be published individually before being gathered together into a single volume). It opens with a variation on the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. Prague is now clearly depicted as its own special version of hell, a city of torment. The title, Theta, has a double meaning—it’s association with death, Thanatos, and its use, θ, as a proofreader’s symbol for “delete”—and as soon becomes apparent, “this novel” now exists an entity within itself. Here, the solitary, curious female protagonist, Alice and Sophie’s heir/doppelgänger, is Eliška Beránková (Lamb). But, not only is she less satisfied to stay within the confines of the text, Daniela Hodrová continually allows the boundary between herself and her creation to blur, even disappear. In a full metafictional turn, the author enters her own novel, and, at one point, Eliška steps out and tries to become a living being. Fiction and fact clash. Some new characters that initially appear to be entirely the product of the text grow more transparent. Others openly straddle the line between fact and fiction. For example, Hodorva introduces her real life husband, trying and failing to keep to the fictional name she assigns him. She grants Eliška imitations of her own life, consciously negotiating her two identities as the manuscript on her desk grows. Through her alter ego, Hodrová, the author, merges with the central figure who is descending into the city of torment in search of her own past.

If this all sounds like an overload—and these are densely packed works—Hodrová writes with a style that constantly refers back on itself, without being repetitive, so the reader does not lose track of who is who. Her narrative second guesses itself constantly (questioning meaning in parentheses) implying that nothing is certain, nothing is written in stone. There is, however, much more going on beneath the surface—historical, literary and place references that would likely be less of a mystery to those familiar with Prague—but for a visitor stumbling into her City of Torment with less background, the Appendix that closes out the work might not quite suffice. So I turned to Hodrová’s Prague, I See A City…, written after the completion of the trilogy, first as an alternative guidebook, but then released as a kind prologue/companion piece to her major work. A short, engaging, magical exploration of her hometown, this book is a perfect follow-up read, not only because it will fill in some of the biographic, geographic and historical details behind the novel, but because, written in 1990, in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution it looks forward, however cynically, to new possibility, with hope of shedding the weight that had oppressed the previous decades.

As noted earlier, the first two novels of City of Torment are characterized by a certain flattened affect and sense of detachment. Composed during the restrictive Normalization period under the Communist government of the 1970s and 1980s, Hodrová was writing without knowing if, or when, it might be possible to release her fiction. It must have felt akin to writing into a void in a world where the dead seemed more alive than the living. The final novel was composed at the end of this period, a time of turmoil, and, when the government fell she stopped writing it, not knowing how a dynamic text informed by a city (or a city formed by a text) might now be altered. In Prague, I See a City… she says of this time:

A revolution of words, an almost fairground battle of words really did take place last year, though its tumult now reaches us only dimly. The city is once more slipping back into its sleep, its unconsciousness, its oblivion.

In those November days, something fundamental happened to the life of this city, to my life. I finished writing Theta at the very moment the battle broke out, for at that moment the city ceased, at least briefly, to be a city of torment.

Far from a conventional travel guide, Prague, I See a City… serves as an immediate refocusing of Prague after the fall of Communist Czechoslovakia and as an introduction to Hodrová’s world-view. As she wanders her city, as if in a dream, the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur. The city she sees is perhaps on the cusp of a new beginning, but the weight of the past, historical and literary will not pass lightly. She reflects on her own childhood, comments on the novels of her trilogy, and visits museums, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle and other sites, evoking the lives of long dead kings and more recent political environments along the way. Published before the recent complete translation of the trilogy, this book could easily be read first, and for its own merits alone, but it is just as effective (if not more so) read as an extended (and exceptionally entertaining) epilogue that offers a fuller understanding of both Hodrová’s literary vision and her idiosyncratic relationship with Prague.

In Both Kinds is a revised translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol (an earlier English translation by Tatiana Firkusny and Véronique Firkusny was published in 2015 as Kingdom of Souls). Puppets is translated by Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny, and Theta is translated by Elena Sokol. Prague, I See a City… is translated by David Short.

Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment, Prague, I See a City… and Kingdom of Souls are all published by Jantar Publishing.

 

 

 

Women in Translation Month 2019: Some off-the-radar reading suggestions and my own modest proposal

Each August is Women in Translation Month, a time set aside to promote women writers from around the world who write in languages other than English and, of course, encourage increased translation of these authors into other languages so that they may be more widely read.  This initiative, started by blogger Meytal Radzinski, is now in its sixth year.

My best ever effort to participate was during 2015, my first year as a blogger. Not only was this before writing critical reviews and editing commitments started to creep into my reading time, but I was also recovering from a cardiac arrest and could stretch out on the sofa and read without guilt. Doing much else was painful! Since then, each year I have made public or private commitments to toss a few extra appropriate titles on the TBR pile and, if lucky, read one or two.  I console myself by remembering that reading women in translation is something that naturally seems to occur throughout the year in the course of my normal reading. As so it should.

This year I have a few books earmarked for the month (fingers crossed), but I thought I would take a little time to suggest some titles that might not be so well known. They’re all taken from my own bookcases and most are (as of yet) unread.

I’ll start with those that I have in fact read and reviewed. First up, poetry:

From the bottom up:
Korean poet Kim Hyesoon won the 2019 International Griffin  Poetry Prize for this book Autobiography of Death, a cycle of 49 poems and one longer piece inspired by national tragedies and personal experience. Her daughter’s distinctive illustrations accompany this powerful collection translated by Don Mee Choi.

Thick of It by German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig, translated by Karen Leeder, is a wonderful blend of the magical and the everyday. Fresh and alive.

Finally, Italian poet Franca Mancinelli’s The Little Book of Passage, translated by John Taylor, is a spare and delicate collection that invites rereading. Earlier this year she and I were able to meet and spend a few days together in Calcutta when my visit happened to overlap with a residency she was doing in the city—evidence that reading the world makes the world smaller in unimaginable ways!

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Second, I wanted to highlight a book I recently reviewed that I am afraid has not had the attention it deserves:

Croatian writer Olja Savičevič’s Singer in the Night features a wildly eccentric narrator and a highly inventive style to tell a story that paints a serious portrait of the world that her generation inherited after the break up of the former Yugoslavia. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth, this book is already available in the UK and well worth watching for when it comes out on October 1 in North America.

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Third, I have an impressive stack of Seagull Books by female authors that I am ashamed to say I have not read yet (save for the poetry title tucked in here). The interesting thing for me about this selection is that although I did purchase many of these books, other titles arrived as unexpected—but very welcome—review copies by writers previously unknown to me.

Most of the above are German language writers; two, Michele Lesbre and Suzanne Dracius are French, the latter from Martinique. The review copy at the bottom of the stack is East German writer Brigitte Reimann’s diary I Have No Regrets.

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Finally, I wanted to include a couple of translated titles by Indian women writers. Two vastly different offerings.

Translated by Kalpana Bardhan and published by feminist press Zubaan, Mahuldiha Days is a novel by Anita Agnihotri, one of West Bengal’s best known writers. She draws on the decades she spent in the Indian Administrative Service in this story of a young civil servant caught between her obligations to the tribal community she is working with and the state.  By sharp contrast, I Lalla, gives a fresh voice the poems of fourteenth century Kashmiri mystic poet, Lal Děd. A detailed introduction by translator Ranjit Hoskote provides a fascinating background to her life and the tradition to which she belonged, opening a world little known to most Western readers.

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So, what are my best laid plans for this month? I would like to read one or two titles from my Seagull stack—not sure which—and I have a new Istros title Wild Woman by Marina Sur Puhlovski on my iPad in PDF format, but the following three books have been patiently waiting for August:

The Snow Sleeper by Marlene van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Marius Swart, is a recently released collection of short pieces, including “The Swan Whisperer” which was published as part of the Cahier Series.  I ordered it as soon as I heard of it—new van Niekerk is a rare and special treat.  Aviaries by Czech writer Zuzana Brabcova caught my attention when fellow readers and reviewers started talking about it so it’s another title I sought out when it was released here this spring. And last but not least, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover is a book I’ve been meaning to read for years now. Will I fit it in this August? Time will tell. And, of course, I reserve the right to change my plans altogether…

The nice thing about books is that, at least with the old fashioned solid form variety, they don’t vanish at month’s end if you don’t get to them. They will still be there on the shelf waiting no matter how much time I do or do not have to read amid all my other projects on my plate this August!

Cold comfort: The Absolute Gravedigger by Vítěslav Nezval

That terrible fist swings the bell
The blasphemer
Is boxing
Hell-bent on knocking out the eye of heaven
That cynically floods desolate white-washed houses
With radial light
With an iron resolution to act
While the knuckles crack
This fist delivers bruises shaped like swallow nests to roofs
In the name of vengeance
(from “The Blacksmith”)

Upon my first read-through of this newly translated collection of poetry by prominent Czech Surrealist, Vítěslav Nezval, I was struck by an eerie sense that the poet was speaking to the present moment. Published in 1937, the poems gathered in The Absolute Gravedigger form a gallery of darkening, disturbing, and frequently grotesque images that capture the mood of the shifting landscape of the years leading up to the Second World War. Some are small, contained, and often bucolic scenes. But others depict expansive nightmarish vignettes of obsession, violence, corruption and decay—evoking imagery worthy of Bruegel, Arcimboldo or Bosch—and closely aligned with the spirit and sentiment associated with the more widely known French Surrealism.

Returning for a second reading, in the immediate aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, I cannot help but wonder how quickly the lessons of the last century have been forgotten—and shudder at the thought of what potentially lies ahead.

gravediggerBorn in 1900, Nezval began writing and publishing poetry in the 1920s, but by the early ’30s, he and a number of his fellow Czech writers and artists had fallen under the influence of the French avant-garde. He first met André Breton in Paris in 1933, and the following year he helped found the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia, the first such group to receive the Breton seal of approval, so to speak, outside of France. Yet, even though they made important contributions to the movement, the Czech Surrealists have remained relatively obscure, a situation further exacerbated by the artistic restrictions applied under the years of Communist occupation. The release of The Absolute Gravedigger from Twisted Spoon Press should help to ameliorate that situation, and spark further interest in the work of Nezval and his contemporaries.

In his poetry, as evidenced in this collection, Nezval was a stylist who drew widely from the Surrealist playbook. In an interview in The Bohemist, translators Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická describe their decision to work together as follows:

Nezval was prolific and incredibly gifted, so the book is over 200 pages, and contains a range of styles from traditional rhymed quatrains to freewheeling litanies and dense, paranoiac prose. A challenge to translate, to say the least, so approaching it as a team seemed like a good idea.

The diversity of the poems in this collection is difficult to capture in the space of a short review. Suffice to say that they range from the relatively conventional to the decidedly bizarre. For example, “The Windmill” is a section comprised of a series of rural compositions featuring farm and small town scenes. However, the imagery is vivid, sometimes surprising in its unexpected shifts, and an unmistakable darkness seems to wait just over the horizon, as demonstrated in this portion of “The Reapers”:

The birds have flown off
Everything on the verge of tears
Huge carts haul off bales of straw
A cock crows
And wheels squeak
The landscape changes
Brown pitchers peak from under gladiolas
And confusion seized the horses
The mills clatter
From afar
As a signal
Like an imminent declaration of war
And suddenly the whole place is holiday empty

Similar bucolic settings return in the later “Shadowplays” section which features tightly rhyming, orderly quatrains which, to preserve the feel of the originals, the translators have chosen to carry into English with as much of the spirit and musicality intact as possible. Because these pieces stand out so sharply against the more open and, at times, unrestrained quality of the rest of the book, this seems to be a wise choice. Coming on the heels of the intense, fantastic and disturbing imagery of the poems in the “The Absolute Gravedigger” section— the title poem, “The Fetishist,” The Blacksmith,” “Milking,” and “The Plowman”—the sudden appearance of a traditional formality catches the reader off guard.

2016-10-27-16-12-40The author has also included several pieces of his own artwork and the poems they inspired framed by two prose pieces in which he talks about the process of decalomania (the creation of abstract images by laying a thick layer of paint on a surface and pressing a piece of paper or canvas against it) and its influence on, not only the directly referenced pieces but other key poems in the book. Nezval explains that the process gave rise to prototypes of “the hybrid creatures” that people his most surreal poems.

There is harsh brutality that runs through the most fantastic and, to put it simply, “surreal” of these Surrealist poems. The characters that are brought to life, resemble the denizens of an adult Grimm’s fairy tale—grotesquely featured, obscenely sexualized, dirty, decaying—and trapped, sentenced to their miserable fates. But the piece that is most profoundly political, and devastatingly timely once again is the final poem, “The Iberian Fly.” Here on the wings and body of a gigantic fly making its way through the skies, a terrifying spectacle is playing out, summoning imagery reaching back to the Spanish Inquisition, but zeroing in on the rising waves of fascist ideology sweeping Europe. Nezval’s original version was apparently more specific, naming names, but increasing censorship stayed his hand before the final version went to print. All the same, the message is clear:

[The Iberian fly’s] proboscis
Was gradually
Immersed
Into several drops of blood
Squeezed out
Of different races
And subjected these drops
To analytical chicanery
Whose fraudulent result manifested
As diagrams
Once these drops
Of blood
Hardened into a crust resembling sealing wax

As the drop
Of drying Aryan blood
Turned into a faux jewel
Spectrally depicting
Absolute nobility
In the form of Ionic columns
Under which reflected in miniature
The beguiling image of bathing women
On the sparkling left wing of the Iberian fly
The other drops
Drying
Transformed
Under the touch of the dirty finger
Of the little man with the Chaplin mustache
Into this pictorial relief

The relief that is depicted in the following stanzas incorporates African and Asian features—a chilling echo of the type of racist graffiti, propaganda and attacks that we have seen post Brexit and, now Trump. And these patterns know no borders. In Canada, where I live, the past week has seen a sharp upturn in the same trends. The immergence of this translation, at this time, is uncanny, there is a new chill to these words, almost eighty years after they were first published.

Plus ça change.

The Absolute Gravedigger is published, by Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press, in a handsome hardcover edition featuring Nezval’s own decalomania artwork on the cover.

Through my people you shall know me: I, City by Pavel Brycz

It could be argued that the celebrated cities of the world – Rome, Paris, Vienna and others – owe their mystique to words of the poets who have walked their streets. But what of the humble, disregarded metropolises, where are their voices to be found? For Czech writer Pavel Brycz, his own love/hate relationship with the city in which he grew up inspired him to wonder how he might access the beating heart of a place more associated with crime and unemployment than romance. He decided to give the voice to the city itself, allow the city to express its affection for the souls residing within its boundaries, and the result, I City, is a work of melancholy tenderness.

CityMost is a city with medieval roots in the northwest region of the Czech Republic. Situated in the middle of the lignite mining region of Northern Bohemia, this fated urban centre has, since the mid 20th century, been associated with industrial development, pollution, environmental degradation, and the social problems that often percolate in similar communities. During the 1960’s, under the Communist government of the day, the historical old town was demolished to allow greater access to the lignite deposits lying beneath its foundations. Remarkably to preserve the late Gothic Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, dating from the 1500’s, the entire building was physically relocated 841 metres, a painstaking process involving 53 transport trucks set on special rails. Meanwhile, rows of uninspired housing constructed of prefabricated concrete panels were erected to house the relocated residents and the new workers who began to flood into the area. The personified city frames this event as indicative of its own nomadic spirit:

“Mine is a migratory soul. And one day you’ll wake up, and you’ll be somewhere totally different than you are today:
You’ve already experienced it once. Don’t you remember?
You looked on in astonishment as the church rode away.
Where does our faith ride? In which direction is our lack of faith headed?
To heaven or to hell, which is the destination of our future? Shhh…
Once before you watched the church slowly going, and the birds were off to the south.
You didn’t know what was behind it. Now, I’ll reveal it to you: I, city, unhappily, happy, hitched up invisible horses and dreamt of a promised land. And I dream about it still, incessantly.”

Through a series of “appearances” – short stories, fragments, prose poems – the city of Most tells its own history, through the stories of its children, young and old alike. And because it was leveled and rebuilt, these are timely, modern stories told with the magic of folktales. There are touching stories of love – kindled, sundered, missed by coincidence. There are the vagaries of youth – from the poetic angst of teenagers to the dreams of hockey glory in far off Canada. There are heartbreaking stories of the lost who return home, like that of the young woman who arrives on her parents’ doorstep after years of living rough in Prague and is welcomed without question; and of the lost who are lost for good, like the solemn lament for the young man whose mean life was cut short:

“He needed wings. He needed to wave at the world from high altitude. Now he’s gone. He sniffed Čikuli stain remover and flew off far away from me, though he lies dead on one of my streets. I, city, don’t know how to shed tears. Because of one boy, the rain won’t fall from the sky.”

The city, as narrator, loves its people, and, as such brings to life a place that is more than its industrial setting might reveal. Kafka, Pope John Paul II and other historical personages make fictional appearances, but it is the common person, the unadorned life, that gives the inanimate entity its pulse. Bohumil Hrabal, one of Brycz’s literary heroes comes to mind here, as his work likewise celebrated the lives of ordinary people.

For all the mixed emotions we often hold for the very places that shape us, Brycz has, in this unique novel, a created a city worth loving because it cares about its own, even if it is helpless to protect or change the fate of any one its citizens. It can only watch, listen and, at times, sit along side them:

“I am a city. I’m full of people. Nothing human is strange to me. I love people. But not because they are great.
I love them because they are small.
There are a lot of them, and they’re all lonesome.
Fettered, they yearn for freedom. They pray for immortality, and yet they don’t survive the touch of death, the Medusa jellyfish. They thought up money and they eternally lack it.
They explained their dreams and then they took sleeping pills.”

I, City, translated by Joshua Cohen and Markéta Hofmeisterová, is published by Twisted Spoon Press.