REVIEWS [3]

Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy)

It Happened on the First of September (or at another time)

Bratislava, Kalligram 2008

According to the authorial incipit of Pavel Rankov (1964) It Happened on the First of September  (or at another time), which was published in the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, “Everything was made up. Nothing has ever existed, nobody has ever lived. There has never been any September 1 either.” The author apparently denies the obvious because, in the space between Komárno and Žilina or between Čierna nad Tisou and Skalica, something beyond human understanding has always been happening. Rankov makes use of the undeniable right accorded him by his talent to make connections in a way that nobody has ever dared to make them, just in the way that his generational consciousness and artistic feeling directed him. In comparison to what the generations before him somewhat cagily adumbrated, the result is shocking: nobody will believe that what happened in his novel actually happened. Indeed, who would give credit to any consciousness and feeling today? Rankov the Merciful knows that, and so, in addition to a good read, he offers his readers the option not to believe in September 1 or anything that happened around this fiction.

On September 1, 1938, in the centre of Europe, at a fashionable swimming pool in Levice, a fictitious historical event occurred: three thirteen-year-old pubescents – Hungarian, Czech and Jewish – decided to compete in a swimming competition to win a claim over the Slovak blonde, Mária. The end is without any result but it continues throughout the more than three hundred-page novel: the three friends’ contest for love is repeated in virtually every year of the novel’s continuation, but the race never ends in victory. The novel rushes its characters onward through political hells, but never allows them to finish the fateful race. The characters’ lives are filled with incredible events but never filled with the most common and sacred human content – love. Nobody wins Mária and Mária, the most innocent, loses all.

Through all the novel’s peripeties the characters’ origin plays a crucial role. The author has had to come to terms with multiple contradictory historical circumstances, which remain the object of political feuds up to the present day: the Slovak State, the Hungarian occupation of Slovakia, the Protectorate, the anti-Nazi Slovak National Uprising, the rise of Israel, the liberation by Red Army, the February putsch, the Communist Terror in the 1950s, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Khrushchev’s political thaw, the Prague Spring, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Each character must pass through purgatory and choose his or her own truth. The characters are virtually impregnated with the historical events determining the trajectories of their lives but, above all, their deeds are dictated by the most global of all strategies – love. In a nonchalant gesture, Pavol Rankov threw the Slovak novel probably the most meaningful challenge of all. If it is up to accepting it, Slovak literature is in for a lot of fun. If not, then Rankov’s novel will remain a constituent fictional feat which overstepped the threshold of what is permitted.

Alexander Halvoník

Plán odprevádzania

(Café Hyena) 

Seeing People Off

(Café Hyena)

Bratislava, Koloman Kertész Bagala 2008

It is plain that Jana Beňová would like to write a novel.  It is also plain that a novel about prefabricated Petržalka (a district of Bratislava) cannot be written. It is not that fictional things don’t happen in Petržalka but that Petržalka abounds in things which have nothing to do with a novel: anonymity, anti-historism, dangerous liaisons, the solitude of a man seeking identity. Jana Beňová may not be aware of all that, but the inspired intuition she demonstrated in three books of poetry and two books of prose is clearly heading towards it. Her (novel-like) vision of Petržalka may be the first prose about this trans-Danubean and transurban continent of concrete, which has its colour, atmosphere and its subjective nature even despite the fact that this is exactly what Petržalka lacks. If the author herself is loath to call her Petržalka creation a novel, it may be due to the fact that in her Petržalka stuff she has mixed some completely new ingredients which nobody, herself included, is accustomed to. The dynamism of “seeing-off” rites is provided by an incredibly abundant narrative separated into fifteen segments.  It is a first-person narrative dealing in particular with the cohabitation of the most prominent characters – Elza and Ian, but also with numerous others – real and fictitious, or even dream-like ones. The object of the narrative is feelings, senses, allusions, dreams, language, lyricism with the flavour of evil, in-depth psychology, real deeds of characters as well as banal thoughts, foreign names, foreign words, words used for a calculated effect, and  effective malapropisms and shocking vulgarities. What really matters is that the narrative never loses its wholeness and every line strikes you with its originality. Intellectuals and boys from the street see off their kind and in their own manner, the seeing-off is done by digression, hastily, with unadulterated warmness as well as angry decisiveness – in the same manner as in the final lines dealing with Ian’s dying mother –  for good and in full awareness of the contradiction of life’s courses. Beňová’s texts are fraught with irony and self-irony, but also with tenderness and a desire for togetherness. They are texts bound by deep layers of feeling and perception, as well as politics and the estranged practices of modern societies. Precise cuts allow the intellectually well-prepared author to respond to everything, although it is quite clear that, in the rich texts, much will remain unread, the accent from some things will be transferred to others and many things will take on new dimensions. But this is always the case for quality literature: time works in its favour.  Beňová’s Seeing People Off  is a good and full book.  In an era of increasingly banal feminine literature, it is a miracle of authenticity indeed. 

Alexander Halvoník     

Šepkár

The Prompter

Bratislava, Albert Marenčin Vydavateľstvo PT 2008

If books by F. Kafka, M. Bulgakov or G. Orwell can be labelled as satirical,  then it must be added in the same breath that it is satire with a vision. Satire with a vision presupposes not only penetrating vision, a sense of humour and wit, but also a system of understanding connections. Peter Krištúfek’s fourth book and first novel follows this path. It means, above all, a release of unknown authorial capacities and, as a consequence, an openness with which Slovak literature is not much at home. Should we so want, in reading Krištúfek we could point a finger at some actual politicians and social archetypes. It is obvious that nowadays we expect literature which overly labels such things, which will show who with whom, why and how, and it is obvious that, in the contemporary upsurge of the novel, this will happen, but not in the case of Krištúfek. For the protagonist of his novel, Krištúfek chooses a prompter.  A prompter is indeed a sage with distance, a connoisseur of the best texts, in which the best about humankind is deposited, but also a helpless recipient of all the blows of fate which can be dealt to its subject at the interface of civilization. A prompter is an embodiment of the necessity that the contemporary world needs an idea but also the proof that an idea is the danger the contemporary world needs the least.  And there is also politics and politicians. The lame duck political boss, Berger, needs a prompter so he can use his thoughts to bamboozle his voters as well as peers. The great manipulator, Berger, thanks to his prompter, becomes a Prime Minister and the intellectual prompter becomes a ridiculous manipulator’s manipulator. In Krištúfek’s rendition, this basic model situation has multiple nuances which add strength to his narration. It is admirable how some situations can be expressed poetically by the author only to be transformed into sarcasms and gallows humour, how he is able to convert the creeping ideology into a dynamic shape fraught with reversals and surprising “shots”. Nonetheless, his parody is once again a picture of reality, although this time around it is more virtual than the one we suppose we live in.  However, all the more lively, life-like and revealing for that.

Alexander Halvoník                  

Na slepačích krídlach

On Chicken Wings

Translated from German by Jana Cviková

Bratislava, Aspekt 2007

The vision of the world seen through children’s eyes involves an irredeemable charm consisting, among other things, of a certain clarity or even naïvety of view which will never be repeated later. This was the writing approach of Irena Brežná – an author of Slovak origin living in Switzerland (she left the country with her parents in 1968) and recognized in Slovakia thanks to the Aspect publishing house – adopted in her most recent book, On Chicken Wings. I love texts (I mean literature for adults) which set off on a journey “against time”. This may sound like a paradox, but it is the “unsavvy”, unadulterated children’s viewpoint which sometimes offers a more truthful picture of events, characters and things than the mature, learned view of adulthood. At the same time, however, it involves risks; authors can never actually find themselves in the child’s shoes, they can only reconstruct the traces of memories left by something they are trying to revive after a lapse of time. The personal dimension of the text is hardly surprising; as it is, the author’s writing is always (also) touching on herself. She uses language to get under the skin right down to the innermost layers of living experience. Language, possibly because the author lives (and writes) in two languages, is for her an important instrument of self-detection, self-confirmation and self-identification but also one of defence and occasionally of refuge. No matter what she writes about, her texts will always deal with language. Occasionally, Brežná can make magic with her words, her imagery is matter-of-fact yet dreamy, her poetic sober yet magical, her images fuse the documentary veracity of facts with poetic imagination… The autobiographical reminiscences (with fictitious elements, of course) provide a concentrated, articulated, even staggering document about the age, the political and, in a broader sense, the social situation in Czechoslovakia (the notorious 1950s up to mid 1960s). The phenomena the author deals with are well-known to all her generation, and it is not just about queuing for bananas or toilet paper, the hunting for goods in short supply and the nepotism…. Most depressing of all was the split consciousness (both private and public), morale and behaviour as such (in families and public life); it was inconceivable to say in the public what one could say at home. The reason: the fear of eavesdropping, the permanent uncertainty as to where and in whom a denouncer was lurking.  The book clearly reverberates with reluctance and unwillingness “to accept the world as it is”, nor does Brežná discard this attitude later, when she responds sensitively to the wrongs, discrimination and cruelties of this world. The sense of justice is a characteristic of her girl protagonist, initially firmly believing in the ideals fed to her at school. The book also finds room for girls’ friendships, secrets, the feelings accompanying the maturing body (collisions with gender stereotypes concerning the “beautiful” female body and “correct femininity”), dreams about the future; desires for wings which let you take off; the truth which could be attained in your own life. In conclusion, the book suggests that the protagonist will not give up on her search for her own way...

Etela Farkašová

Toto je moja reč

That Is What I Mean

Bratislava, Ikar 2008

Kamil Peteraj’s poetry from his individual books is bred in the reader’s bone in the form of mournful arrows of dragonflies, the quiet and fast turns of butterflies, pure snowflakes of love, trembling as they fall into snowdrifts where they melt or fly away like feathers. The young poet exhales colours as if they were colours and in the lyrically unstable frost sticks the glittering swallows of his verses on the windows of our eyes, on the doors of our memory. Of course, in his life-long authorial selection That Is What I Mean all this sticks, nonetheless we are unable to resist the feeling that we are dealing with a poet who beneath his bowed back has the classical scales on which he places increasingly heavier weights. The air of his poetry, too, can even be leaden, when he broods on the human journey and especially on its end. Death features increasingly urgently in the poet’s verses, it has no lyrical parameters, it is precise and oppressive, whereas the march towards it, the march - because from its point of view we are always as if on parade - is destructively regular and hauntingly hollow. Only when reading this book may we understand what a serious and meticulous author Kamil Peteraj is. His poems may take place on quite a mundane stage, in a threadbare setting but the readers will be shaken by their razor sharpness, like the shining point of an eye, the living sense, they will accept as the sixth and probably the most precise one. Peteraj perceives events around him as a part of his own self, he is able to see himself with a strange, half-detached view which is more about sensing than seeing. He is not the author of sentimental or touched up lyricism, his observations and records are logically translucent and, if we can see beauty in rationally compact collocations, that’s the way they are. He is not naive;

what may seem paradoxical is that his poems from any period are the poems of our frequently cruel contemporaneity and possibly similar experience. Kamil Peteraj selects and culls his words naturally, he sifts them. This is precisely why this selection can be a record of his lifelong ability to work with them; although they drop on us from his verses like clear rain, we perceive them as drops and then we shape our poetic world all on our own from all the riches we were served by this charismatic poet. 

Viera Prokešová

Excentrická univerzita

The Eccentric University

Bratislava, Koloman Kertész Bagala 2008

I’m not sure, but I may have convinced myself that the recent development of Slovak prose has increasingly frequently been mentioned in connection with such names as M. Proust, J. Joyce or F. Kafka. It is, of course, about the great narrators of Modernist prose and about the specific Slovak situation in which a novel is no longer a rarity but duty addressing every prose writer... The novel is on the increase and soon there will probably be even more of them. The author and literary scholar, Stanislav Rakús, says his bit about it all. He not only writes, but also analyses novels. With a typical dose of ironic charm, he admits that his three novels, today regarded as a trilogy,  (Temporary Notes – 1993, Unwritten Novel – 2004, The Eccentric University – 2008) were written because originally he intended to write a book of short stories but everything took such a methodological and thematic twist that he wrote three novels, after which he may be able to write the book of short stories he intended. It is an ingenious mystification indeed.  Because these short stories were at least about a novel too.  Initially it was diary-like and temporal, then unwritten and finally eccentric and university. The Eccentric University, in my opinion, is about how to write (and complete) an ideology-free novel. Rakús invented a “silent” and a “narrating” narrator. The former replaces omniscience, the latter, quite paradoxically, is serum against beating about the bush. The former listens in as a skepticist (not sexist!), the latter fills the space with wondrous content: there is no point in wisecracking,  all you need is to listen and narrate. And one must believe that there is a lot to be told and listened to – that is the first principle of Rakús’s novel. The second principle is the eccentric university (Prešov), directing the fates of the characters which are talked about and worth listening to. They are the fates of freshmen studying Russian literature in the 1950s (not everyone can come up with such an ingeniously simple paradigm).They are captivated by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov (Chekhov is probably – not without a hint of paradox – the spiritus movens of Rakús’s strategy of writing novels), are filled with the noble Russian nostalgia of the 19^th century but they are also fed by the Russian presence in our history of the 20^th century. The name of the greatest narrator is Viktor Pavlovič Bochňa, who is an intellectual Ostap Bender of sorts. He is innocent and that is why he eventually takes the blame. All such abstractions, however, are but temporary notes or a novel by a critic who is all but captivated by the immediate and, in the Slovak contexts, heretofore unheard-of narration of an ingenious author who theorizes everything up through his own experience.

Alexander Halvoník