Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "czech"
Three Generations of East European Writers
Some of the most interesting novels are coming today from Eastern Europe. Three such recent books have caught my eye: Kornél Esti (New Directions, 2011, trans. by Bernard Adams) by the Hungarian writer Dezsö Kosztolányi (1885-1936), Coming from an Off-Key Time (Northwestern University Press, 2011, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth) by the Romanian writer Bogdan Suceava (b. 1969), and All This Belongs to Me (Northwestern University Press, 2009, trans. by Alex Zucker) by the Czech writer Petra Hulová (b. 1979).
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Kosztolányi is one of the greatest (alas, unknown) 20th century writers, a writer so versatile he could pen a novel in the realist, lifelike style of Flaubert (Skylark) or write in the absurdist tradition of his Viennese contemporary, Peter Altenberg (Kornél Esti). In the latter, each chapter can be read separately, like a vignette, or like a dialogue between the narrator/writer and his friend and alter ego, Kornél. In one of these dialogues, Kornél travels by train in Bulgaria, and although he only knows a few Bulgarian words, he decides to have a “real” conversation with the Bulgarian train guard, without betraying himself as a foreigner. What follows is one of the most hilariously absurd dialogues ever written.
Suceava’s novel describes the turmoil of the early nineties, immediately after the fall of communism, in Romania’s capital, Bucharest. The novel focuses on two of the mystical-nationalist sects that had appeared at the time: The Tidings of the Lord, whose leader is Vespasian Moisa; and the Stephanists, whose leader is a reincarnation of Stephen the Great (famous Moldavian 15th century prince, who won forty-six of forty-eight battles against the Turks). One of the founding members of the Tidings of the Lord, a professor of history, believes that Romanian language is a chosen language that conceals a code, and another one believes that this code encloses in it the cure to baldness!
Petra Hulová’s novel was published in the Czech Republic when she was in her early twenties, documenting her experience during the time she’d spent in Mongolia. It is written in the voices of five women from the same family, who belong to three different generations, and it depicts the conflicting interactions between them, and those between a traditional, rural world and the modern (albeit poor), urban world of Ulaanbaatar. The English translation was awarded the 2010 translation prize of the American Literary Translators’ Association.
The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík
The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík (Trans. from the Czech by Káca Polácková. Open Letter, 2011)
I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.
Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.
The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.
I was familiar with Open Letter’s commitment to translation, but I hadn’t seen their books until recently. I can now state that next to Archipelago Books (another publisher specialized in literature in translation) Open Letter publishes the most beautifully designed books in this country. The covers have a sober elegance that few books have in the current environment in which publishers seem to compete for the gaudiest packaging possible. Everything—the font, the covers, the description on the back cover—is tasteful. The only criticism I would have for the novel I recently bought, The Guinea Pigs by the Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík, is that the original publication date, 1973, isn’t specified in the author’s bio. The date is important considering that the author was one of the literary voices of the Prague Spring in 1968, and that the novel was written during that particular era in Eastern European history.
Written as if it were addressed to children, the novel uses this rhetoric strategy to explain the meaning of various “scientific” terms, and embraces a pseudo-scientific tone when describing the details of the narrator’s experiments on his guinea pigs. The narrator is a father of two young boys who works at a state bank in Prague, where he observes and participates in what for an American reader might be an act of sabotage of the bank. For an Eastern European reader, however, the narrator simply does what everybody else did at the time: steals from his workplace in order to survive. The description of the numerous absurdities of the Communist regime—which is never mentioned as such—combined with the dialogues between father and sons and the “objective” description of the guinea pigs create a hilarious effect.
The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the narrator’s relationship with his guinea pigs. Whether one reads the book at a literal level—as a novel about a Czech family in the seventies and its cute guinea pigs—or as a metaphor about a political system in which the citizens are treated like guinea pigs, The Guinea Pigs makes for a very entertaining (and educational!) reading.
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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