"I walked over to the radio and pressed the button that said Phonograph."

The Guinea Pigs
By Ludvík Vaculík
Translated from Czech by Kača Poláčková
179 pages
Open Letter Press
May 17, 2011




. . . I turned off the speaker and locked the pickup arm. Then I went back to the table where Ruprecht was waiting. I carried him over to the phonograph and wondered what speed I should choose for him. First I tried thirty-three rpm. He huddled down on the turntable and made jerky movements with his head, but otherwise he didn't show any distinct attitude towards what was going on. In his voluntary helplessness, he was incapable of moving closer to the center of the revolving turntable, so that he might keep his nose from bumping against the rim of the phonograph. I was beginning to get made at him. I stopped the motor and changed the speed to seventy-six. But that was senseless; at that speed Ruprecht was swept off the turntable and he fell behind the pickup.

Ludvík Vaculík (1926-) is a Czech writer know internationally for his novels The Axe and The Guinea Pigs, as well as a volume of essays called A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator. A progressive member of Czechoslovakia's Communist party, he was ousted for his manifesto Two Thousand Words that had galvanized the Czech people during the Prague Spring of 1968 and alarmed the Soviet Union. For decades Vaculík faced constant persecution and his writings were censored. From 1971 to 1989 he ran a samizdat publishing house called Padlock Editions that printed and distributed over 400 banned books.

1973's Morcata (The Guinea Pigs, translated by Kača Poláčková) concerns the misadventures of one Vašek. Vašek lives in Prague and has a wife named Eva and two sons. Every day Vašek goes to work at the State Bank where he and most of the other employees routinely try to steal money, only to have it confiscated by the guards when they leave. But the confiscated money never returns to the bank's reserves. This is very odd. His elderly colleague "Mr. Maelstrom" believes the bank intends to suddenly flood the monetary supply and drive Czechoslavakia into a depression. Meanwhile, Vašek's family has acquired several guinea pigs, starting with an albino female named Albínka, followed by a male named Ruprecht, the short-lived Red, and Red the Second. Vašek is very fond of his new pets. The narrative is framed as his hidden manuscript, addressed to an imaginary audience of children, chronicling the weirdness and mystery that daily envelopes him.

Many of the books I've read from Eastern Europe during the Cold War era have a clear Kafka influence, as articulated by Milan Kundera in The Wall in My Head anthology. The expanded role of the state under communism meant greater intrusion into citizens' lives in the form of an opaque and incomprehensible maze of bureaucracy. In the face of such an omnipresent system, the individual is caught up, pulled in various directions, and sometimes ground up in the gears. Not surprisingly, Vašek has gone a bit nuts. He cares for the guinea pigs, he really does. He never explains why exactly he tries to drown Ruprecht in the bathtub or traps him in the window until he nearly freezes or tempts a cat with Red the Second. He does say he wants to hold them in his hands but that only adds yet more incongruity. From the guinea pigs' perspective (and not to mention the reader's), Vašek and his motives are as enigmatic as those of the bank are to Vašek.

The Guinea Pigs is not ostensibly a political novel. It is one man's account of his daily life, dissonantly cheerful and peppered with dark humor. It is a novel of irony: Vašek lacks any self-awareness whatsoever and doesn't consciously recognize how he, his family, and the guinea pigs are linked as the playthings of unknown forces. The power of the story is in the juxtaposition of menace and absurdity that captures the mood of an oppressive society without resorting to documentary-style portrayals of arrests, censorship, and suchlike. It is reminiscent of Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring in that respect, as an indirect protest. Ludvík Vaculík brings us a unique and creative take on life behind the Wall that is either amusing or disturbing or both.

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Review Copy

Prague Peasant

Can there really exist a world in such close proximity to our own, one that seethes with such strange life, one that was possibly here before our own city and yet we know absolutely nothing about it? The more I pondered on it, the more I was inclined to think that it was indeed quite possible, that it corresponded to our lifestyle, to the way we lived in circumscribed spaces that we are afraid to leave. We are troubled by the dark music heard over the border, which undermines our order. We fear what looms in the twilit corners; we don't know whether they are broken or disintegrating shapes of or our world, or embryos of a new fauna, which will one day transform the city into its hunting ground. . .

When I reviewed Louis Aragon's 1926 novel/treatise/memoir Paris Peasant a couple weeks ago, I had no idea that I also owned its uncredited sequel. A prominent member of the French Surrealist movement, Aragon, like many writers and artists following the Great War, perceived a rapidly changing world in which traditional notions of art and expression were being demolished. "A great crisis is brewing, an immense disquiet taking shape as it approaches. Beauty, good, right, true, real . . . so many other abstract words are crumbling into dust at this very moment. And their opposites, once accepted in their turn, soon lose their own identity." Responding to this vertigo - an uncomfortable liberation, eternally detached from the familiar, nostalgic and and full of loss - Aragon tried to re-imagine the function of mythology, which had once ordered and articulated a contingent, amoral universe. While acknowledging that most people do not want to break from their accustomed ways, Aragon sought to argue in favor of looking beyond the surfaces and reinventing the mundane into something wonderfully subjective. The modern world is still full of possibilities: you just have to be willing to look for them.

Now it is one thing to just think up new, radical ideas in literature. It is quite another thing to actually realize them.

Although Aragon tried to put his theories into practice by writing Paris Peasant, a novel that he claimed would break the rules of the novel, I don't think anyone truly succeeded in mythologizing the modern and wedding metaphysics to art and literature until Michal Ajvaz came along and wrote The Other City (Druhé město, translated from Czech by Gerald Turner) in 1993. The Other City is not simply a rumination on different modes of seeing and interpreting. It is not a treatise. It is a book that takes the Surrealist transformation of everyday objects and crosses the border into speculative fiction. It is simultaneously an argument in favor looking beyond and beneath words and surfaces, and the story of a man who discovers another world embedded in our own. Think of a cross between Paris Peasant and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and you'll have at least a partial idea of what Ajvaz has accomplished.

Like the reader, Ajvaz's unnamed narrator begins with a book. (Like The Angel's Game too - I wonder how many other novels share this metafictional premise?) One snowy afternoon in a used bookstore he comes across a purple-bound volume written in an unknown language, accompanied by several strange illustrations. He takes it to a scholar, who is immediately unnerved and recommends that he put the book back and forget the whole thing. Instead, the narrator's curiosity is intensified, and he quickly finds himself wandering deep down the rabbit hole. As with Last Nights of Paris, by Louis Aragon's compatriot Philippe Soupault, there is a very Surrealist preoccupation with chance and spontaneity. Although the narrator does have a fixed goal in mind - to learn more about this other dimension and eventually reach its core - the unfolding of his knowledge occurs not through rational, deliberate clue-seeking but via unexpected encounters with fantastical beings and bizarre situations, such as the time he wrestles with a shark behind a cafe and ends up impaling it on a cross held by a statue on the St. Nicholas parapet.

The speech of the otherworld denizens is appropriately meandering, full of long-winded nonsensical tangents and built on wild metaphors and unexpected juxtapositions.

"Until just a few years ago the scientific community, with the rare exception, was of the view that the great battle in the depths of bedroom could not be regarded as a historic event. It was maintained that the records in the reference books were not reliable and were the result of the historicization of certain rituals connected with underground celebrations of expulsions of dragons from savings banks. It was also pointed out that there was no reference to the battle in the famed Lion's Chronicle, which was found, as you all know, on a rainy night in a plastic wrapper on a seat in an unlit compartment, just as the train stopped on the track and the compartment was just beneath the lighted window of an Art Nouveau villa at Všenory, the light of which was reflected in the wet leaves of the darkened garden. It is truly astonishing that the scholars who were hypercritical about the source material should not have found it odd that the chronicle was found precisely outside a villa in whose window could be seen dimly lit on the wall part of a picture on which could be discerned the figure of fauns dancing in a meadow. It would seem that one of the historians noticed that the small object painted in the grass below the birch tree bore a striking resemblance to the scrubbing brush used in the spa-temple, where, one evening, the priest said into the clouds of steam rolling over the baths: 'In the buffet of a distant town, on a blackboard with the names and prices of the meals, is written in chalk the last message of the Lord of the Outskirts - a warning that the blackened interiors of vases exhale into our spaces. This breath, declares the Lord of the Outskirts, corrodes the old constellations. Nor must you forget the impatient and nimble pincers of machines lurking behind the long walls in the streets of Smíchov. . .'"

It's absolutely wonderful! Very reminiscent, I thought, of some of T.S. Eliot's imagery -

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Also very similar to the results of William S. Burroughs's "cut-up" method too (though considerably tamer). The dialogue isn't simply randomness, however, or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. And this is where Aragon failed and Ajvaz succeeds: Ajvaz, through his haunting and beautifully jumbled prose, articulates the inarticulate. Aragon, despite his claims to the contrary, tried too hard to appeal to the intellect and resorted to difficult philosophical concepts to support his ideas. (What the heck is "frisson"? He kept using that word. I do not know what it means.) The result is a book that's largely inaccessible.

The Other City, by contrast, is deeply instinctive. That's the one word I can use to describe it. Everything makes sense even when it shouldn't, and even when you can't explain it in concrete terms you know the meaning is there in the back of your mind.

Conversations with members of one's own tribe are always only a tedious echo of one's own words. All conversations are fed from the great conversation between those who live within the homeland and what wafts over the border: a murmur, in which the rustle of fabric mingles with the howling and whining of monsters and musical compositions played by an orchestra of exiles for the space of several days.

The language and spaces of the Other City are the dark areas under furniture and in the backs of drawers and camouflaged within the patterns of wallpaper. In a world that constantly seeks answers, to discover the Other City is to come close to the primeval source of being, where the mind expands and the nooks and cracks are filled in and objects take on new forms. "Why are you poking your nose in our affairs?" an indignant citizen demands of the narrator. "Just remember: whoever crosses the border becomes entangled in the bent wires that stick out of things that you consider broken and which, in fact, have returned to their original form, as it was etched in the surface of a glass star wandering among the constellations." It is dangerous and dizzying, this search for the central plaza where a young god's body was torn to pieces by a tiger and meaning will be made real.

Or is the plaza truly the end of the journey? Are there cities upon cities upon cities, all layered on top of one another, and going not deeper and deeper towards the source but laterally extending into infinity? Ajvaz asks us to consider these questions, and many others. "The Other City" is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and I strongly recommend it.

Surrealist WIN!

City Sister Silver (A Review)

Lost in Translation Challenge Book #5

Coincidentally the tongue I use is one of the Czechs, of Slavs, of slaves, of onetime slaves to Germans and Russians, and it's a dog's tongue. A clever dog knows how to survive and what price to pay for survival. He knows when to crouch and when to dodge and when to bite, it's in his tongue. It's a tongue that was to have been destroyed, and its time has yet to come; now it never will. Invented by versifiers, spoken by coachmen and maids, and that's in it too, it evolved its own loops and holes and the wildness of a serpent's young. It's a tongue that often had to be spoken only in whispers. It's tender and cruel, and has some good old words of love, I think, it's a swift and agile tongue, and it's always happening.

The Bookslut Blog described it as "one part Burgess, a little bit of Joyce, mix in some Kerouac." To Amazon reviwer Pete Hausler, it is "everyone from fellow Czechs Bohumil Hrabal, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek, to others such as Celine, Pynchon, Kerouac, Irvine Welsh, Blaise Cendrars, and Anthony Burgess." To me, Jáchym Topol's 1994 novel City Sister Silver is William Burroughs's Naked Lunch meets Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, with a tenderness and wide-eyed abandon reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It's the real avant-garde thing: a post-modern punk version of T.S. Eliot's "waste land" that literally ends up among the vast detritus of a newly capitalist Prague. Along the way, it is Dante at the end of the twentieth century: a gradual descent to the lowest level of a country on the edge. How Alex Zucker was able to translate this is beyond me, but then again, I heard Naked Lunch has been translated to French, so I guess nothing's impossible.

The blending of formal and conversational language in English has become commonplace in our literature as the boundaries between the "high" and "low" have also blurred and what was pop culture yesterday is legitimate artistic or intellectual expression today (jazz and film noir, for instance). Those creators who whine about their work being dismissed as trash miss the point. Art does not exist in a vacuum, nor is good taste determined solely by the standards of sages in ivory towers. Although English literature (that is, literature in English) has been reflecting this creative populism for some time now (I find myself thinking of John Dos Passos's 1930 novel The 42nd Parallel, first in his U.S.A Trilogy), this was until very recently a radical concept in Czech. According to Zucker's introduction, the original Czech publisher of City Sister Silver felt compelled to include a disclaimer stating that Topol's "intent [is] to capture language in its unsystematicness and out-of-jointness." The gulf between literary and spoken Czech is a sizeable one, Zucker explains, and they are bridged by a spectrum of "intermediate levels" for which English has no equivalent (I believe Japanese is similar). City Sister Silver, however, is about the era in which "time exploded," and Topol's deliberate confusion of grammar, spelling, syntax, and style is actually a linguistic portrayal of the sudden end of one society and the simultaneous beginning of another.

The story is narrated by a young man named Potok as he drifts through a soon-to-be Czech Republic that has just thrown off communism and has yet to re-orient itself. The basic outline of the multilayered, barely-linear plot is this: Potok lives in Prague and is a member of a "byznys" tribe involved in various smuggling and racketeering activities. It consists of his four "pseudodroogs" Bohler (a wannabe priest and holy warrior), Micka (borderline sociopath), David (redneck in the city), and Sharky (jaded, deeply cynical Jew). They also shelter an extended family of Laotian refugees in one of their buildings, which inspires the racial hatred of the working class tenants and an attack by skinheads. After the tribe's breakup, several of the Laotians, who turn out to have been rebel leaders and possible war criminals back home, hire Potok to help them continue their vague "mission" of terror and intimidation. All this time, Potok has also been reminiscing about his ex-girlfriend She-Dog, the stolen moments they had together under the Communist regime, and the prophecy she delivered before she left that Potok would one day have a new "sister." He soon meets Černá, a despondent singer at a local dive bar. A series of complicated events - guns, betrayal, organized crime, Laotians - leaves Potok stranded in a backwater town full Deliverance-style hillbillies. There he finds his old friend David, who had driven catatonic by events in Prague and been returned to his impoverished family. Unable to take it, Potok smothers David with a pillow, takes off, and locates Černá in the nearby woods. They wander together through ruined towns, wild countryside, and acres of illegal flea markets. After losing Černá, Potok drifts along aimlessly until he winds up living among bums in a Prague trash heap, where a monster lurks and tears its victims to shreds. The novel ends in a Prague transformed: skyscrapers gleam and busy people brag of having "no time." Potok seems to have settled down.

City Sister Silver is wildly meandering, but in a good way. Stream-of-consciousness and mythological storytelling predominate. The prose often reads like poetry. Potok tells his pseudodroogs of a drug-induced dream he had in which they were all taken on a tour of an otherworldly Auschwitz. He recalls his time in Berlin as a "Kanak," a member of an international underclass that moved in a parallel universe of drugs, dingy apartments, snuff films, police, and a garbled lingua franca made up of myriad tongues from all over the world. Language and society build upon each other, and Topol's frenzied, chaotic narrative is inseperable from the social anarchy that reigned during and shortly after Czechoslavakia's Velvet Revolution. City Sister Silver is also a highly personal, individualized book whose protagonist adds an intensely human element to a tumultuous setting where other characters seem interchangeable, nothing in byznys or politics is certain, and language is up in the air. Potok may not be the most reliable narrator, but he is sympathetic, a romantic, a drinker, and easy to identify with in his ongoing quest for love and a soulmate. In my favorite passage, he imagines himself and Černá as a pair of wolves fleeing abuse:

…my loved one was a bee and a butterfly and knew how to cut with her claws and her tongue, and I tried too … we learned from each other what was good for the other, and that made both of us stronger … running, and the earth turned beneath us, running by graves and leaping across them, avoiding the bones and glassy stares and empty eyesockets … of wolf skulls … and steering clear of traps and snares, we had experience … with falling stakes and poisoned meat … we made it without harm through the red pack's territory … and met the last of the white wolves, they were wracked with disease … and the big black wolves chased us, but we escaped … we, the gray wolves of the Carpathians, had an age-old war with them, they were surprised we fled, their jaws snapping shut on empty air, they had a hunch it was their turn next, the helicopters were on the way … we ran side by side, our bodies touching … running over the earth as it turned, with the wind whistling in our ears like a lament for every dead pack … and the clicking of our claws made the earth's motion accelerate … we ran over the earth, a mass grave, running away …

Although City Sister Silver is full of beautiful moments such as this, it also drags at times and the jumbled plot can be more annoying than artistic at times. But Jáchym Topol's groundbreaking novel is highly recommended as both a creative achievement and a window into a culture and a time in history. Reading City Sister Silver is also a strongly subjective experience and I am eager to know how others will interpret it and what components of the narrative will stand out to them.

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Lost in Translation Challenge Update

Again, I just found out about the this challenge so here is a list of what I've read so far that qualifies:

Christian Jungersen, The Exception (Danish)
Jakov Lind, Landscape in Concrete (German)
Ilja Pfeijffer, Rupert: A Confession (Dutch)
Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring (Catalan)
Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver (Czech)

I do have The Angel's Game on my Chunkster list, but the sixth book may well be something else. Depends if I've asked for another ARC from Open Letter Press (don't remember if I did).