What do you think?
Rate this book
Rates of Exchange & Why Come to Slaka?
Welcome to Slaka! A land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor, of cultural riches and bloody battlefields. Malcolm Bradbury's hilariously entertaining and witty novel, RATES OF EXCHANGE, introduces the small, eastern European country of Slaka. In less than two short weeks there, first-time visitor Dr Petworth manages to give a rather controversial lecture, get embroiled in the thorny thickets of sexual and domestic intrigues, fall in love, and still find time to see the main tourist attractions. In the wickedly funny satire WHY COME TO SLAKA? Malcolm Bradbury offers the would-be visitor, a la Dr Petworth, a wealth of information about the Slakan state, its pageantry and politics, its people and public figures, as well as some essential Slakan 'American Express? That will do very nicely.'
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
1 person is currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Malcolm Bradbury
122 books87 followersSir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors – which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.
He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.
Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.
He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5 Produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies was screened on BBC One on July 15 2000.
He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.
Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.
He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5 Produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies was screened on BBC One on July 15 2000.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 18, 2009
When I first picked this one up I was a bit bored by the vaguely humorous, tongue-in-cheek , but way out-of-date travelog about a thinly disguised Eastern European Communist capital named Slaka (probably Prague) during the Cold War. But I perked up when Bradbury introduced his hero, a biddable English linguist from a minor university named Angus Petworth. Petworth is going on one of many cultural exchange trips he has made with the British Council, only this time to a country with no British Council office to supervise his trip in place. Many of the sources of humor in this book are satiric and focused on stereotypes of communist satellites, but on top of that Petworth is funny all by himself and redeems the novel for a contemporary reader unfamiliar (or tired of) Communist stereotypes.
The sources of humor are many:
• The linguistic battles and in-jokes of the 70ies and 80ies that surround Petworth’s professional life: “a rich international sub-language—he would call it an idiolect—composed of many fascinating terms, like idiolect, and sociolect, langue and parole, signifier and signified, Chomsky and Saussure, Barthes and Derrida, not the sort of words you say to everybody, but which put [Petworth:] immediately in touch with the vast community of those of his own sub-group…”
• The stereotypical “types” in Slaka: the heavies, dissidents, the professors trying to walk a thin line and those trying to convert the visitor to Marxism. Those extolling the virtues of the socialist state and those trying to impress with their experience of the West.
• The language itself. Much of the text is monologue (or comic dialogue with Petworth supplying the straight lines) in what most will recognize as the typically mangled syntax associated with Eastern Europeans. In addition, the country itself is having a language crisis and the spelling of words changes overnight, causing the name of the official newspaper as well as words on prominent signs to change overnight. In fact, the changing words signal changes in regime, which of course the politically innocent Petworth (dubbed as is “not a character in the world historical sense”) doesn’t recognize.
• A certain reflexiveness, an awareness on the part of the narrator and of Petworth that the characters in the story are characters in a story.
• The recognizable appurtenances of Communist countries: the listeners (no unemployment because so many are employed spying on others), the bureaucracy, the abbreviated and capitalized names of offices and programs (COSMOPLOT, HOGPo) to say nothing of "The Park of Brotherhood and Friendship with the Russian Peoples" and the portraits of Lenin and Marx and Breshnov alongside the local leaders.
• Petworth’s name: he is called Petwit, Petwurt, Pitvit (perilously close to nitwit), Petwet, and even Pervert.
• Other names: Professor Rom Rom, Mr. Plitplov, Steadiman (the husband and wife together are called Steadimen). The hard currency store is Wicwok.
• The woman who chase Petworth: the magical realist novelist named Katya Princip for whom he falls, the wife of the English Cultural attaché named Budgie Steadiman, his official guide Marisja Lubijova. Petworth as "lover" and especially as "loved and desired" is hilarious.
• Petworth’s lectures: One is on the difference between “I haven’t got” and “I don’t have” in English….
• A certain “Homeric ring” when epithets are applied to repeated themes, like “the dark wife” for Petworth’s wife back home in England. Recurring minor themes like the whispers of “do you want to change money” all travelers are warned against.
• Echoes of Western literary favorites: “in the room professors come and go talking of TS Eliot”, “But that was in another country and the wench now has tenure”, ”A line of short stout lady professors sit in the front row, thinking Marxist thoughts and knitting”.
Those who get the academic humor and those who remember the rigmarole of visiting a Communist country will probably enjoy this book more than others. As well those who appreciate writing that sacrifices anything for wit.
The sources of humor are many:
• The linguistic battles and in-jokes of the 70ies and 80ies that surround Petworth’s professional life: “a rich international sub-language—he would call it an idiolect—composed of many fascinating terms, like idiolect, and sociolect, langue and parole, signifier and signified, Chomsky and Saussure, Barthes and Derrida, not the sort of words you say to everybody, but which put [Petworth:] immediately in touch with the vast community of those of his own sub-group…”
• The stereotypical “types” in Slaka: the heavies, dissidents, the professors trying to walk a thin line and those trying to convert the visitor to Marxism. Those extolling the virtues of the socialist state and those trying to impress with their experience of the West.
• The language itself. Much of the text is monologue (or comic dialogue with Petworth supplying the straight lines) in what most will recognize as the typically mangled syntax associated with Eastern Europeans. In addition, the country itself is having a language crisis and the spelling of words changes overnight, causing the name of the official newspaper as well as words on prominent signs to change overnight. In fact, the changing words signal changes in regime, which of course the politically innocent Petworth (dubbed as is “not a character in the world historical sense”) doesn’t recognize.
• A certain reflexiveness, an awareness on the part of the narrator and of Petworth that the characters in the story are characters in a story.
• The recognizable appurtenances of Communist countries: the listeners (no unemployment because so many are employed spying on others), the bureaucracy, the abbreviated and capitalized names of offices and programs (COSMOPLOT, HOGPo) to say nothing of "The Park of Brotherhood and Friendship with the Russian Peoples" and the portraits of Lenin and Marx and Breshnov alongside the local leaders.
• Petworth’s name: he is called Petwit, Petwurt, Pitvit (perilously close to nitwit), Petwet, and even Pervert.
• Other names: Professor Rom Rom, Mr. Plitplov, Steadiman (the husband and wife together are called Steadimen). The hard currency store is Wicwok.
• The woman who chase Petworth: the magical realist novelist named Katya Princip for whom he falls, the wife of the English Cultural attaché named Budgie Steadiman, his official guide Marisja Lubijova. Petworth as "lover" and especially as "loved and desired" is hilarious.
• Petworth’s lectures: One is on the difference between “I haven’t got” and “I don’t have” in English….
• A certain “Homeric ring” when epithets are applied to repeated themes, like “the dark wife” for Petworth’s wife back home in England. Recurring minor themes like the whispers of “do you want to change money” all travelers are warned against.
• Echoes of Western literary favorites: “in the room professors come and go talking of TS Eliot”, “But that was in another country and the wench now has tenure”, ”A line of short stout lady professors sit in the front row, thinking Marxist thoughts and knitting”.
Those who get the academic humor and those who remember the rigmarole of visiting a Communist country will probably enjoy this book more than others. As well those who appreciate writing that sacrifices anything for wit.
July 21, 2012
The hero (I use the word ironically) of this story, Angus Petworth, goes to Slaka and comes home again. (He is a linguist who’s asked to give lectures, and this is a very routine trip for him, so he thinks.) While there, he meets the novelist Katya Princip who tells him that he is in a story with her. She means the kind of stories that she writes, ones based on folktales. She has cast him in the role of the young prince who goes into a strange forest, and herself in the role of the witch he meets there—as she points out, it is often hard to tell whether a witch is good or bad at first meeting, but she insists she is a good witch. But it turns out that all expectations that a reader has in this narratively subversive novel are doomed to disappointment (as Petworth is doomed to disappointment). This is not a hero tale: as is well known, a hero is expected to return from his journey having proved himself and bring back something of value. Though Katya Princip tries to encourage Petworth to develop a "sense of existence", in fact he returns home feeling just as empty as when he left (worse, even, since he now knows that he is missing the sense of existence). And he fails to bring back an object of value; it is true, this is not his fault, but then he has never been in control of events for one moment. He has always been completely passive. No wonder it is a failed hero tale.
Another possible narrative model is provided by the legend of St. Valdopin, whose body was bought back by his countryfolk for an equal weight of gold, the scales finally being tipped by the very small contribution of an old woman. This comes close to truth, for commerce is everywhere in Slaka, unsurprisingly (this, in a country that boasts of its rational economy). Yet, if the relationship of Petworth and Princip is transformed into a transaction, it is a deal that ends up bringing no advantage to either party, since Princip, unlike the old woman, cannot buy honor for her country, and she cannot (though she tries) give Petworth what he needs either.
What about the narrative provided by Petworth’s most reliable lecture, "English as a Medium of International Communication"? Although most of the people Petworth meets speak English, international communication most definitely does not go smoothly. In fact, Petworth is left bewildered in Slaka. He is a linguist who completely fails to learn any of the local language and doesn’t even try to; more importantly, there are language-related events going on in the country, apparently of great moment, yet he sees little of them and understands nothing. The ways he knows to talk linguistics, in terms of Derrida and Saussure, are utterly inadequate to give him any insight into the situation. We know from the appendix that Petworth made that lecture into a book after his return, another sign that he learned nothing.
The novel is not a comedy in the classic sense, since it does not end with lovers uniting. Instead it ends with Petworth returning to his wife, from whom he is, and will presumably remain, totally estranged. The possibility of a better, truer love was raised in Slaka, then dissipated, illusory. As if in a comic Bildungsroman, Petworth had various sexual adventures, but he did not learn or grow from them; he’s too old for that genre anyway.
So, not only does all possibility of accomplishment or growth fail for the protagonist, the narratives that might belong to various genres all end in failure too. Subversion of expectations is a form of humor; a bitter humor here. To be sure, there are plenty of other reasons to laugh in this book—for instance, it makes abundant use of sexual farce, and there is the reliable subject of the discomforts of a traveler in a foreign country which is not at all suited to journeying in comfort. But from Petworth’s point of view, the story is nearly a tragedy—just the fact that he has been aware that his life is empty, and returns with that emptiness unrelieved, is enough. So the closest I can come to describing it is as a laughing tragicomedy.
Another possible narrative model is provided by the legend of St. Valdopin, whose body was bought back by his countryfolk for an equal weight of gold, the scales finally being tipped by the very small contribution of an old woman. This comes close to truth, for commerce is everywhere in Slaka, unsurprisingly (this, in a country that boasts of its rational economy). Yet, if the relationship of Petworth and Princip is transformed into a transaction, it is a deal that ends up bringing no advantage to either party, since Princip, unlike the old woman, cannot buy honor for her country, and she cannot (though she tries) give Petworth what he needs either.
What about the narrative provided by Petworth’s most reliable lecture, "English as a Medium of International Communication"? Although most of the people Petworth meets speak English, international communication most definitely does not go smoothly. In fact, Petworth is left bewildered in Slaka. He is a linguist who completely fails to learn any of the local language and doesn’t even try to; more importantly, there are language-related events going on in the country, apparently of great moment, yet he sees little of them and understands nothing. The ways he knows to talk linguistics, in terms of Derrida and Saussure, are utterly inadequate to give him any insight into the situation. We know from the appendix that Petworth made that lecture into a book after his return, another sign that he learned nothing.
The novel is not a comedy in the classic sense, since it does not end with lovers uniting. Instead it ends with Petworth returning to his wife, from whom he is, and will presumably remain, totally estranged. The possibility of a better, truer love was raised in Slaka, then dissipated, illusory. As if in a comic Bildungsroman, Petworth had various sexual adventures, but he did not learn or grow from them; he’s too old for that genre anyway.
So, not only does all possibility of accomplishment or growth fail for the protagonist, the narratives that might belong to various genres all end in failure too. Subversion of expectations is a form of humor; a bitter humor here. To be sure, there are plenty of other reasons to laugh in this book—for instance, it makes abundant use of sexual farce, and there is the reliable subject of the discomforts of a traveler in a foreign country which is not at all suited to journeying in comfort. But from Petworth’s point of view, the story is nearly a tragedy—just the fact that he has been aware that his life is empty, and returns with that emptiness unrelieved, is enough. So the closest I can come to describing it is as a laughing tragicomedy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 16, 2015
Mid 2. For the first 100 pages or so, the farce crafted by the author has appeal, with this reader impressed at the author's acerbic wit. Yet, as the novel progresses, the repetitive nature of the exchanges and one-dimensional parody of the Eastern Bloc becomes tiresome.
Read
August 7, 2011A must for language learners AND anybody interested in life under communist rule in Eastern Europe. The scenes describing the hero's arrival at the airport are classic.
November 24, 2017
'Rates Of Exchange' is excellent and left me wanting to know more about Slaka. When I read 'Why Come To Slaka' I found it a little disappointing because it didn't go in the direction I wanted it to. I want there to be more world-building but instead Bradbury chose to make it kind of satirical, which does fit with the original idea of the novel but still. The novel would be five stars on its own and 'Slaka' three, so the four-star rating is an average.
December 16, 2010
This book is absolutely hilarious, and pretty accurately depicts the confusion one feels being a foreigner in a land where one doesn't speak (or can barely speak) the language. It also does an excellent job of depicting the absurdities of life in a Soviet era country (albeit a fictional one). Also, it is unabashedly, fabulously British. I only wish that some of the loose ends had been tied up a little better. Still, an enjoyable read, especially for those of us who love travelling in the former Soviet Union!
August 9, 2013
Just read this again.
It's funny, because it's true. Having spent a few months in one of the Eastern Bloc countries in the 80's, much of this story rings true to me, making this absolutely hilarious.
It's funny, because it's true. Having spent a few months in one of the Eastern Bloc countries in the 80's, much of this story rings true to me, making this absolutely hilarious.
April 9, 2016
Re-defines 'funny'. Loved it.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews