Why Come To Slaka?

by Malcolm Bradbury

Why Come To Slaka?

Genres: Humor, Travel, Satire, Nonfiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published November 5, 1987

About the author

Sir 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.

Reviews

[Zuberino · Rating 3 out of 5]

So back in the early 1980s, Malcolm Bradbury wrote a humorous novel called Rates of Exchange about the travels of an English academic in an imaginary Soviet-bloc country called Slaka. (Which I swear from the name appeared to me to be Albania or Yugoslavia, but which other people suggest could be Romania or Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia...)

No matter. Three years later, Bradbury took his conceit to the next level and concocted this slim volume - a fictional travel guide to his fictional country. The title page tells you all that you might expect:

******************
WHY COME TO SLAKA?
A GUIDEBOOK AND A PHRASEBOOK

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY
DR F. PLITPLOV
(DOZENT EXTRAORDINARIUS, UNIVERSITET DVARFIM BORISM)

INTRODUCTION BY DR A. PETWORTH

ISSUED BY THE MIN'STRATII KULTURI KOMIT'ETIII
(MUN'STRATUU KULTURU KOMUT'ETUUU)

PUBLISHED BY THE STATE PUBLISHING HOUSE "V.I. LENINIM"
(PRAV'DI V.I. LENINSKI/PRAV'DU V.U. LENUNSKU)

PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF SLAKA
(STATII PRO'LETANIII SLAKAM/STATUU PRO'LETANUUU SLAKAM)

************************

And so on and so forth for the next 100 pages. This is satire that is mostly gentle and affectionate, though occasionally rather sharp. Bradbury has managed to capture the absurdist funhouse quality of life in a communist East European country, as refracted through an institutional publication which is meant to promote and enthuse but which nevertheless dismays as much as it amuses the reader. There is garbled English on every page (thanks to the indefatigable Dr F Plitplov), while the lists of travel phrases are an exercise in sustained anarchy. Those are the best bits of the book. Bradbury also gives every sign of having grappled with the Slavic languages, although in truth he seems to have fared rather better than me in this regard... Either way, an amusing way to waste an afternoon.

[Kevin Warne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book by chance at a book store that was going out of business. It's a satirical guidebook to a fictional Eastern European communist country called Slaka. It's a very quick read and the same kinds of jokes about inefficient bureaucracy and police control over and over again. Depsite that, it feels familiar to anyone who has ever done a lot of traveling and found themselves in places that were equally confusing, frustrating and oddly charming in all their chaos. This is the companion book to the novel, Rates of Exchange, based in Slaka. As a novel, it's probably a little better, though I haven't read it. Even so, this fictional giudebook was clever and fun to read.

[Angelina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Devious! As a Russian, I read this aloud to myself with a dense Russian accent to increase the comic effect. If you come from any country of the former "behind the Iron curtain" bloc, enjoy, but do not under any circumstances let your old Grandma read it! Spare her feelings, please! :)

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? This historical document depicts Slaka in a moment in time. And though Slaka, that little country once known as a bloody battlefield, has now joined the ranks of (soon-to-be) members of the Eurozone, Schengen area admittance is still some ways off. At any rate, Slaka-ophiles will enjoy this peek into its recent past and note how this nation has begun to capitalize on its "folklorical" heritage--its annual peach brandy (rot'vittii) festival is not to be missed!

For those who have settled in Slaka or a country historically, culturally, or linguistically tied to it, Why Come to Slaka? will feel heartwarmingly familiar. You may have already gotten used to nodding meaning "no" and a horizontal head shake meaning "yes," have acclimated to the high level of formality, and adjusted your understanding of translations, which may not always be up to Western standards. But you remember that time when you first stepped into Slakan territory (maybe as far back as when COSMOPLOT agencies were responsible for tourists): you felt both thrilled and confused. Here was a nation caught somewhere in the middle of everything--geography, culture, time, seeming both contemporary and a bit behind all at once. Simultaneously, here was a place where people were either sincere and welcoming or frosty and suspicious, but never in between. Life, here, was unpredictable. But when it was rewarding, it was unbelievably so.

Indulge your nostalgia for the Slaka of the last century with this charming guidebook, refresh your memory of Slakan phrases, and share your stories with other travelers to Slaka over a glass of peach brandy. Slaka!!!

[Peter Rooijmans · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is by itself almost a good reason to found the country of Slaka!