Vyhľadávanie
Márius Kopcsay
Zbytočný život (Useless Life)
Levice, LCA Publishers Group, 2006
It started with An Important Day, then came The Lost Years, and finally (for now) it all ended up with the Useless Life. In exactly ten narratives the author confronts the memories as well as his contemporary problems. Despite some poctic license that allows for fantasy, Kopcsay's protagonist walks in and out of the stories without a significant change of identity; he truly is alive, a being composed of flesh and blood, and not an artificial construction. The reader is ready to believe, thanks to the subtle hints, that all the experience was derived form the author’s life, especially a reader in his forties and one trying to live like a good citizen and parent who has to make his living honestly. Kopcsay’s Useless Life is more than the stories offered here. It is about the feeling of life that is forced on the protagonist, where everything conspires to tell him he is useless.
Already the introductory story, “Coal Holidays” suggests an atmosphere of uselessness. As the Pupil, with a capital “P,” does not go to school, as there is no coal to heat it, he is bored and tries to fill his time by daydreaming about flying. This is how he can overcome the feeling of emptiness. The inner world becomes more important than the real world. The story “Visual Perception” is the story of the week. People just bum around and like pawns make a step forward, only to make one back the next day and some other day a step aside to the left or to the right. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months and years and an entire life. The author takes a critical look at the present situation. His mood could be characterized as being in a state of permanent anger. However, he does not only lash out, but ridicules himself, adopting an ironic manner, dealing with the world he lives in ironically. The story “Stink,” is only a brief comical sketch, a hyphen among the other texts. In the ”Complex colourful Story,” the author continues to compare: the manifold story of an erotic strawberry that the Writer only dreamed about produces a sharp dissonance with the reality of his life. His inability to develop the flirt and take off from his wife and child for adventures as a bulldozer of female hearts shows up in the story “Love.” And so the unfinished dreams remain unfinished only by suggestion: their unfinished quality of the narrative is their conclusion. “The Climax (An Unfinished Composition),” takes the reader back to the protagonist’s childhood. This time, the main narrator and character is called Oliver. He describes the vacations, the excitement of time with his relatives, the reactions of his mother, but also his own loneliness while undergoing his treatment of an allergy. The climax here is his dream about being a train engineer free to travel wherever he wants, just to escape the reality of the divorce of his parents. In the “Saviour,” Kopcsay makes an absurd joke with the help of aliens for whom our planet is too stupid and vulgar. The following story, “The Young Lady behind the Counter,” is a variation on the erotic embarrassments. Satirical thorn is sharpened here on the narrator with a significant name Paľo Kriak-Tŕnistý (the hyphenated last name meaning “thorny bush”). The story “Moving Out,” talks about the search for an escape from a depressing fate, this time in alcohol. The moving of the family, new employment, inability to perform in an extramarital affair are only a few motives for the narrator’s ambition to become an alcoholic. The conclusion of the collection is a story from the future, “Vacations in Orbit.” In a form of diary retrospective, the son returns to the years of his father’s hopelessness, sadness, and embarrassment. Some consolation comes from the knowledge that even the son, though he never lets anyone know, experiences similar disappointments as he did once before. The feeling of desolation, failure, the running in the circle, of vanity, is the feeling that is experienced by the present generation as well as the former and obviously will be recognized by the future ones, too.
Kopcsay talks about ordinary people and things, he does not invent experiences, he lets the action flow in a linear fragmentary chain, only here and there interrupted by the memories of the past and the attempt of searching for the roots of the exceptional. In this sense, Kopcsay’s texts remind one of therapeutic search for the roots of the dependence (on the loss of hope). They talk about the everyday life in an extraordinary manner.
Ľuboš Svetoň
Erik Jakub Groch
Em
Prešov, Slniečkovo, 2006
This collection of two dozen poems forms the first book of the edition “Verses on line.“ Erik J. Groch is a poet of particularly spiritual lyrical poetry who continues in his own poetic—philosophical road that has been in the last few years connected with the search for love. However, he seeks love not as a value in itself, but as the deepest cause and principle of life, and a principle of inner awakening. His effort is expended to make love believable even in the 21st century. That is why his poems aim at the expression of love’s essence and it seems that this essence is in its incommunicability and the dialectics of desire and the nearness of death. Groch aims for love “with torturous joy,“ (p. 8) and his subtext connects experience, spirituality, and intellect. Love here comes in concrete images of nature and body, in the spiritual vision of existence, and the intellectual openness of perception. Into the one interconnected whole thus flow lover’s poetry, prayers, and philosophical meditations. Truly, we haven’t seen for a long time as persuasive and intense evocation of love as in the poem “Waiting,“ and as pure and devoted prayer with an individual ethos as in the poem “Litany,“ and as ethereal a meditation with an open sensual charge as in the Poem “Love.“ The poems are strong and new because of the synthesis of the three elements which evoke the representation of the love relationship in the literary art of the mystics, as seen in the following excerpt:
Loving will not disappear, it will only become gentler
Until it hears itself again; if our body
Breaks down into your and mine body (p. 10)
The last two “poems“ are texts from an email communication: they serve as a moment that concretizes and brings down to earth and thereby intensifies the authenticity of preceding poems. This opens the possibility to see the chain of poems as an inner kaleidoscope of the mental states of the lyrical hero in love with a woman hidden, as the title suggests, under the pronounced M.
Erik J. Groch breaks down the contemporary kitsch of our everyday life, because his love is not exclusively emotional and his mind is not cynically speculative. His love is poetry.
Radoslav Matejov
Karol 3D Horváth
Levice, L.C.A. Publishers Group, 2006
With the third, blue, Karol Horváth (the previous ones were red and yellow respectively) the author concluded his “true color“ cycle of stories two years after his late debut as the author of the same name and the finalist of the literary competition Anasoft Litera 2005. Here the author lets us know where his method of recording complex human stories and grotesque events comes from. He is answering a postmodernist challenge that calls on us to ridicule the classical and modernist literary effort and to use the multimedia effect to disturb the old settled genres and the evanescent nobility of the tradition. If one can set oneself an aim like that, then we can say with clear conscience that Karol Horváth managed to achieve his aim. In his stories there is no respect for tradition, or traditional characters, not is there for traditional topics. This is true of all three of his coloured books, particularly of the last one. But on the other hand, there is a lot of other stuff, such as theatrical and performance elements.
First of all, there is a lot of tenderness. While at the same time, the first thing that hits the reader’s eyes and senses is blood and vulgarity. The eyes can see and the nose can smell and the ears can hear everything palpable. Most of the stories are contaminated by the destruction of people by cruel men. The characters murder or witness murders of the American calibre improved by the Central European specifics. They move in the world where a nice word is considered impolite and the soul with its suffering is seen as a contemptible embarrassment. The gangsters, the underground lost souls and the foolish consumers don’t even look for an opportunity to shoot someone, rob their neighbour, and to show their power: they all live in the centre of cruelty, lies and violence. However, they often do something that deviates from this norm and makes them eccentrics in this strange world: they go to a funeral with a cactus and fall into the grave (“The Flight of a Fly”), they write on a piece of wood a gnomic poem to the secret lover and set it on fire in front of her door (“The Best Gnomic Poem”), or demolish a kitschy country feast in bloody mayhem together with the participants (“I Hate Oompapah Music”), or when no better possibilities beckon, they make an attempt on their own life. It is because they live in the author’s image of the real world and behave the way they should. As if in a modern music video, they quickly move from a situation to another situation, from an action to another action until their self-destruction. Their life story maps with merciless precision and horror-like grotesqueness all the evil, though, of course, this is not their literary intention. The intention is a warning caricature of the world set in consumerism and digitalization. Its meaning is the paradoxical exposition of the inner life of the characters that cannot be realized in the action, but which nevertheless exists and shows itself in the eccentricities that do not fit the phenomenology of the consumer age. The first paradox: Horváth is fast, harsh, and full of action, but it is above all about the emotion, its absence, deformation, or deviant expression. All those ridiculed and undelivered bouquets, cacti, burning poems, dreamy reality shows and exaggerated sex are expressions of unfulfilled humanity and Horváth deals with them with borderline sentimentality.
The second paradox: the stories are full of literature. Horváth knows all about mystery, horror, thriller, fantasy, realism, adventure and sentimental prose. He also knows about the quixotic iconoclasm of the so-called serious literature. All of that has left some traces on his own vision of prose that is both a ridicule, as well as a parody and at the same time an attempt to build his own style. If we say that his stories have a beginning and an end, it means they managed to transform the formlessness of the contemporary feeling
of the world and give it a precise shape in which the mental organism works thanks to the details that connect the relationships. If the dimension of the meaning shows horror and decadence, the dimension of the stylistics introduces a matter-of-fact language with significant dialogues.
Third paradox: There is a lot of civilized intellect here. Horváth likes the village and the suburbs, but his main theme is the infiltration of the relationships by the ultramodern lifestyle and technologies. That truly is a work for a fine diagnostician with a sense of comedy and the talented Horváth fulfills without a doubt these roles.
Alexander Halvoník
Viliam Klimáček
Námestie kozmonautov – Generácia Ю
(Cosmonaut Square – Generation YU)
Bratislava, Koloman Kertész Bagala, LCA Publishers Group, 2007
Viliam Klimáček won the literary competition for Novel 2006 with Cosmonaut Square, and his pseudonymous gangster parody English is Easy, Csaba is dead has become
one of the most successful revivalists of the postmodern picaresque novel. However, he is also a member of the literary school that was based on the stages of the alternative theatre scene. This long process of destruction of the traditional novelistic mythology is felt in his prose. Action dominates, comedy is stressed, together with the hyperbolezation of language. At the same time there is a relativezing irony that dissolves everything using any available means, so that the form of the novel is only a communication package delivering diverse contents. This is how the postmodern authors deal with the “freezing“ of the genres that used to operate in a larger temporal and space dimensions and worked with relatively closed systems of action, characters, and time, but could not get to the plurality of the human authenticity or prevent the truth from being ideologized. It seems that dashing around the worlds of novelistic openness on the steed of virtuality became boring even for Viliam Klimáček. One cannot suck a novel out of one’s finger, however magic it may be, and in addition to the craft one does need a bit of conceptual ideology, a pinch of closeness, and certainly also the risk of simplification. So here comes the first point: Cosmonaut Square is looking for a novelistic statement.
Above all, Klimáček has invented the Generation YU. This is a generation born around 1958 that matured during the time of the Soviet occupation and is marked by its admiration for the western lifestyle symbolized by the English homonym “You.“ These are the two relevant circumstances that caused the notorious generational schizophrenia with consequences that are worse than the Divine Wrath: maybe it was not painful, but it pushed everything into the level of absurd humour.
In Klimáček’s novel, socialism is no longer the point, what is important are the consequences of socialism surviving in the schizophrenic situation. We find ourselves in a post-communist period, in a small town called Veľké Roje that “the history passed by,“ but which always kept its hand on the pulse of the time no matter whether it produced weapons, hosted a Soviet military base, built monuments to heroes, celebrated foreign victories, while all the time diligently destroying its own people. After the Velvet Revolution, the Christ’s Calvary, that was renamed the Calvary of the Cosmonauts, again becomes the Christ’s Calvary. The secret employees of the secret weapon factory become the unemployed, the loyal citizens become gangsters, strange businessmen and homeless, so the destruction of one’s own people continues despite all the hypermarkets for all. Everybody wants to live the new life, but the muddy footprints of the past cannot be overcome. The action of the novel takes place during four days when the small town celebrating its three-hundred-years anniversary is visited by the respectable people as well as the rabble in order to perform, among the props built from noble intentions deformed by reality, their own absurd human comedy. The characters have to remember a lot and re-evaluate their lives: the novel is filled with memories and outlandish actions of the characters, all this being a continuation of senseless history that moves the characters into the role of actors on the stage with the mission of capturing the interest of the audience. Klimáček’s characters are all tragic and what distinguishes them is the degree of absurdity revealed by their gestures and actions. The author understands them and is compassionate to them, but as far as the philosophical overview of the situation that the novel necessarily demands is concerned, it is lacking and the novel stays on the level of helpless understanding. This is the tax paid for the audacity to elevate postmodern openness for a novelistic statement about a generation at the time when the novel has to search for a new mission, after its tradition has been put in doubt, and when the new ideas are still nowhere to be seen. The author
was trying to excise a painful appendix but he hit on a vein of gold of inspiration. It is entertainment, but mostly painful, though the vein may indeed be full of gold. Klimáček is trying to make up for the lack of spiritual dimension by introducing magic with comical or horror elements. At any rate, in his novel he created a generational vision by applying the means of postmodern poetics that he managed to overcome to a certain extent. In this century, this is the first relevant attempt to provide a novelistic statement about the eternal argument between the subjective and the objective.
Alexander Halvoník
Anton Hykisch
Spomeň si na cára
(Remember the Tsar)
Martin, Vydavateľstvo Matice slovenskej, 2007
Anton Hykisch showed many times in his novels The Times of Masters and Love the Queen that the historical novel is not merely his pastime, but his serious creative domaine where he has at the moment no competition in Slovakia. He knows how to find a theme, how to honestly research it, document it with historical facts and furnish an attractive story for all of this is such a manner that it could carry the message incarnated by complex characters. That is the reason why Hykisch, the historical novelist, is being read, translated and that is why he is aging less than more fashionably modern sounding masterpieces.
The most recent of Hykisch’s novel, Remember the Tsar, while based on a historical reality, could hardly be considered historical, though its theme is indeed historical. It is the reconstruction of the life story of the author’s uncle, who was the right hand of the Bulgarian Tsar, Ferdinand Coburg (1858-1945), “the most eccentric ruler in Europe“ who was active particularly during the years of the First World War, before it, while all the time being in love with the mineral rich mountains of Slovakia. And so he enters the historically mapped terrain with the accidental family keepsakes and the life of a Slovak youth with diplomatic ambitions and moreover, with the author’s attempt to combine into a whole the fragmentary knowledge about his relative according to the possibilities offered by a concept of a novel with its message. The author was offered this topic which in its multidimensionality is almost postmodern and where all the dimensions will remain equally important and whose final outcome will not only introduce the European character of the Slovak contexts, but will search for a more inclusive philosophy, meaning, or sense. After all, the title itself, with its imperative accent, points the reader to other than one-directional reading.
Hykisch is magnanimous and kind to his characters. He depicts Ferdinand Coburg as an overly sensitive man who loved his dead mother, nature, butterflies, modern technology, a man involved in the pleasures of the fin de siecle and experiencing a sense of nostalgia for it, but at the same time as an ambitious man who was possessed by the diplomatic wheeling and dealing in Europe full of little wars and ripening for the big one. His aide-de-camp, Anton H., comes from the modest means of Central Slovakia, and educated in the classical Slovak respect for the authorities, he seems preordained to become the faithful servant and to forget about himself and his native land in the service. The author takes the reader on a tour of European royal courts and places of action of the fermenting Europe, mapping the ruler’s historical accomplishments, crimes, while letting us peek into his weaknesses and not always pure intimate relationships. One can always sense the ironic distance that eventually
issues into the harsh criticism of the European aristocratic helplessness to stop the slaughter of human beings. But the author does not save the irony when dealing with the Slovak servant whose blind obedience seems equal to the lack of charm and his awkwardness, particularly in the matters of love and eroticism, and reaches the point of the absurd. When finally the Slovak youth loses his innocence in the service of the eccentric ruler, he takes a wrong track and solves his problem by defrauding the crown for which he pays by being sent to the most horrible hells of the First World War, where he also perishes. His lover, the teacher Anna, reminds him after his death:
“I’ve see those monarchs of yours, those aristocrats, and such like, how they put the partridges and the grouse, birds created to fly, how they placed them, suddenly frozen, deeply humiliated, their muscles seized, into the mud stomped by their polished boots… Defence against overpopulation…Son they will start the war against the overpopulated Slavs, against the Yellow Danger, against the Chinese, Japanese, or the Malays… You, the hero, the graduate of the diplomatic academy, the magician of diplomacy, the master of dodges without weapons, why don’t you clearly stand up against these criminals?”
And so this noble and highly matter-of-fact reconstruction of the story of the master and the servant, even though bearing the same love for Slovakia, is punctuated by sober chapters and measured with regular narrative rhythm, documented by the period photographs is not merely making the history or a history of a man alive for us today. It is also a reflection of the times and an urgent actual challenge.
Alexander Halvoník
Kamil Peteraj
Čo sa šeptá dievčatám
(Whispering to the Young Girls)
Bratislava, Ikar, 2007
Despite the large offering of book titles, it is almost impossible to ignore this newest collection of poems by Kamil Peteraj. An attractive cover, top graphic design on a god paper and impressive illustrations will please the curious eye of a reader—a surprise in the guise of Peteraj’s experimental photographs.
The collection subtitled “Texts, poems, and statements about love,” closes a gnomic aphorism: “The history of love/ is written/ by the conquered…” I apologize for starting at the end, but this statement by Peteraj is characteristic and suggests a clearly defined line of thought for this text.
His poetic expression does not lack melodic ease, expressive precision and economy, or gradual dynamic fall. Peteraj, ever since his entrance into literature and later in his song lyrics period, was immune to the inflationary sludge of words and linguistic rigidity. His central motif is not exclusively love and its emotion, but these motifs serve him as a bridge to other important situations. Significant place here is taken by the impalpable quantity of time, its merciless flow on the background of changing reality. Peteraj in this wild flow takes stock of himself, his attitudes and opinions. His scale of values is however clear and unchanging and he feels no need to correct it from the point of today. He does not have to return to the words their former polish, since in his understanding they never lost it. Maybe because in his texts resonates humility, silent scepticism and ever-emerging hope. Maybe it is a careful hope, but it motivates and renews one:
Tomorrow another moon will come out
It won’t be so painful.
Impressive, too is Peteraj’s playfulness and self-irony that shows up quite often in his texts. This fact is always welcome in an author of “serious” lyrics and seems quite refreshing. In the moment when doubts appear, this self-irony is at its most effective. His thesis: I no longer know what it is I believe in can be accepted only with a temporary validity, since his faith in the noble emotions is transparent and permanent. I cannot void a negative comment for his settle phrasing of the type: “swinishly complex,” “disgustingly beautiful,” “messy like the inside of a tank,” that stick from his texts like straw from the shoes of a farmer. They are disturbing from the point of view of the whole composition.
It is noteworthy that Peteraj does not live off the momentum of his popularity, but offers in his newest opus a good quality and attractive poetry. It may not be inventive and surprising poetry, but it certainly is unmistakably his and it inspires one.
Miroslav Bruck
Marek Vadas
Liečiteľ
(Healer)
Bratislava: Koloman Kertész Bagala, L.C.A., 2006
In his newest collection, Healer, the author has ventured into the Dark Continent for the second time after his Tales from Black Africa (2004). Vadas has created in Africa a world that seems made for the expedition experience: it is an alternative, parallel world that exists—to paraphrase the narrator of the story “River”—independent of our present life and one that we are eager to get to know. Vadas in this world takes the reader to the border where the sacred and the profane coexist: the fantastic is quite a natural and everyday event there, same as in a myth or a fairytale. Vadas aims further: he returns mystery and myth to the prose and moreover, he does that in a competent manner also stylistically, inventively and successfully. In his stories he uses two basic interpretative codes: on the one hand there is the archetypal, mythical, “primitive” one (manifested by the “African” view of the world), where the fantastic is natural and on the other hand, there is the sophisticated “civilized” one (manifested by the “European” view of the world), in which the fantastic is unacceptable. These two conceptions either exclude each other (hence confrontation that forms the meaningful heart of his stories), or the first one of them is operational (in stories that are poetic pictures of the African world or in his oriental quasi-stories). Most of the stories keep to the basic scheme: the introduction sketches out the fantastic, that in accordance with the first conception is perceived as natural, only to get to a “conceptual” reversal: the originally fantastic gets a rational explanation (in the story “New Job”). The reversal does not constitute only the point and conclusion of the stories, but are found in various places of the stories in the form of surprising, but inevitable paradoxes. A strong point of the narrative is a collection of “identities” of the personal narrator (Vadas uses the impersonal narrative rarely): it could be a white man, or a black, or an old man, a child, or a woman.
Fantastic motifs chosen by Vadas are expressively archetypal, archaic, known from the traditional folklore: “David woke up with a strange feeling. In the evening he lied down on the mattress as a man full of strength, in his best years, and in the morning he woke up as a woman” (“Desperately Beautiful Life,” p. 95). The female element in this paradigm of the world culture is physical and sensual, admirable and positive, as well as erotic and motherly. Despite the fact that there are fewer female characters in these stories than male ones, the female archetype fulfills an important role here.
Vadas’ stories, despite their ironic reversal could be understood as an effort to return to the original archetypal situation (of the country, person, culture…), as the movement from the civilization with its negative connotations towards the pure origin, towards the borderline between the good and evil, alive and dead, where the possible and impossible meet at the border. This border is depicted positively: it is a space where one meets oneself, a place to linger, to find oneself, a place of cure. An alternative world is seen as a counterbalance to the contemporary consumer taboo-less world/culture. That is why I consider this collection of Vadas’s stories the best one he has written so far.
Jana Pácalová
SLOVENSKO
History. Theatre. Music. Language. Literature. Folk Culture. Fine Arts.
Slovak Abroad
Edited by Magdaléna Fazekašová
Bratislava, Literárne informačné centrum a Perfekt, 2006
In the introduction to this compendium we learn that this publication “wants to inform Slovaks and others about our history, theatre, language, music, literature, fine arts, architecture folk culture and about Slovaks abroad. Let it serve as the primary source of information for us and our descendants.“
This would be a fitting formulation providing there was no other compendium of this sort and if there were no other encyclopedic publications about Slovak culture for the wider public. However, in the recent period we have seen several such publications and some of them were published under the same title. We are pointing this out in order to suggest that this publication is not that much of a pioneering venture as is suggested here, however, there is no doubt that its content and its graphic design make it a successful project.
The authors first take the reader through the history of Slovakia. One can see they are trying to interpret history objectively. The writing is interesting and the illustrations fittingly enhance the facts and connections. This is particularly true in the chapters on theatre and music in Slovakia, where it is confirmed that the development of these arts was enabled by social and political events. We find a voluminous section on language, its story on the territory of the present Slovakia that, for example, in another compendium, Slovakia, published by the Otto publishers in 2006, is unaccountably missing. When it comes to literature, it is obvious that we are dealing with a work by a number of authors, but that does not mean that the characteristics are not fresh and clever and that the evaluation of authors are not different than in textbook literature. Similarly, in the area of folk culture, which is organized in a folkloric and ethnological manner, and in the area of architecture and fine arts. In this connection it was well said that the area of Slovak culture was supplied “by the flow of foreign influences,” and that the caravans of wanderers, merchants, and fighters automatically packed some elements of the spirit of our people and took it out to the rest of the world. The exposition is symbolically concluded with a chapter on Slovaks abroad. It is a very informative ethnographic chapter that would benefit by giving more information on the life of the Slovak language in various parts of the world. They could have also found some place for a chapter about the minorities and minority languages in Slovakia.
The beautifully designed book (Braňo Gajdoš) with great illustrations concludes with an index of names and things. We have heard that there are plans to translate this book into other languages. In this case it would be useful to consider whether it would not be a good idea to add to this picture of Slovakia some other aspects: more detailed exposition of the political and social life in Slovakia and its inclusion in the European Union. The book would be more complete and useful “for us and our descendants.”
Slavomír Ondrejovič
