Perhaps Ordinary Lives, the latest, and possibly last book from the amazing Czech writer Joseph Skvorecky will make the Nobel prize committee take notice.
Ordinary Lives,by Josef Skvorecky. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. Key Porter Books, 237 pages, $14.95
Reviewed by Roberta Silman
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1924, Josef Skvorecky has produced a body of work that makes him one of our greatest contemporary writers. I suspect the prose is even more beautiful in his native language, (he has become the most beloved Czech writer of his time), but I first came across him in an English translation in 1979 when I read his gorgeous prose poem, a novella called The Bass Saxophone, a meditation on youth and yearning, the seduction of jazz and the pain of dislocation that was part of the life of every young Czech during the Second World War.
Then, in 1984 he published perhaps his most ambitious work, The Engineer of Human Souls, a huge novel juxtaposing Skvorecky’s exile in Canada (he emigrated there in 1968) with his past in Central Europe when his country was devastated, first by the Nazis, and then, after the War, by the Soviets. One of the great pleasures of that book is to see how deeply Skvorecky loves literature, especially our American writers, and how willing he is to reveal that obsessive love as he interacts with his students.
Until his recent retirement he taught English literature at the University of Toronto and ran a small émigré publishing house with his wife of more than fifty years. Engineer was nominated for a Nobel prize and in the 25 years since there have been several more novels – one of my favorites is Dvorak in Love, subtitled A Light-hearted Dream – and detective stories, but Skvorecky has somehow eluded the Nobel prize committee. Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, Ordinary Lives, will make them take notice.
Although only 201 pages in this excellent English translation by Paul Wilson who has collaborated with him since Engineer, this newest novel has the urgency and magnitude of Skvorecky’s best work as it explores “an ungovernable torrent, scarcely even thoughts” that assails Danny Smiricky, Skvorecky’s alter ego in all his books, who has come back to his fictional hometown Kostelec for two high school reunions – in 1963 and again in 1993.
The volume also proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young. And although at first it may seem confusing to sort out the friends who have come back to these reunions, Skvorecky gives us copious notes, which tell us about these people and refer back to his earlier books, enticing us to read or re-read those previous works.
Both sections of Ordinary Lives begin with the opening I remembered from The Bass Saxophone, “Twilight. Honey and blood. Indifferent to the historical situation of nation and town, it spoke to me, aged eighteen, on the leeshore of a land-locked lea in Europe, where death was less extravagant, more modest . . .” As I read, first “it spoke to me, aged thirty-nine,” and then “it spoke to me, aged sixty nine,” I thought I might feel a sense of resolution, of peace, at the unfolding stories of this group, meeting in the very same Hotel Beranek where The Bass Saxophone had taken place.
Josef Skvorecky writes books that not only embrace his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility.
But even in his eightieth year (this book was first published in Czech in 2004), Skvorecky has no time for nostalgia. He is determined to show us what really happened to these ordinary people with their ordinary dreams, and when you read, over and over again, about how they were thwarted, not by bad choices, which sometimes happens in countries like the United States and Canada, but because there were, literally, no choices except how to connive and survive under the Nazis and their totally crazy racial laws and then the Soviets and their equally crazy machinations against those who refused to join The Party, and then during the botched efforts at freedom, e.g. the Prague Spring, until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Throughout the book you feel the outrage and frustration at all the might-have-beens, if onlys, and finally at how political beliefs and governments formed far from a town like Kostelec can ruin lives. Forever.
Hilarity mixes with sadness when you learn how people resorted to bizarre solutions merely to live, how they lied, betrayed, hurt those close to them, because they were naïve, or just plain dumb. And because these are the people he grew up with, you feel a sense of intimacy that only the best books can give a reader, as you despair with Danny over how broken some of them are, and how lucky he was to escape and start a new life. At one point, though, when he is called an “emigrant,” he corrects the speaker with “exile.” Let’s get this straight, once and for all, he seems to be saying.
And yet exile has its price. Here is Danny facing himself:
“I was suddenly overwhelmed by indifference, the kind of indifference I had only experienced in Canada when I realized, with a sensation of bliss, that nothing could happen to me there, except that I might die in a plane crash, a quick and, I hope, definitive death. Indifference, our mother, our saviour, our destruction. When I wrote that line a long, long time ago, it was an automatic triad, the instinctive impulse of the conscious mind to organize everything into groups of three, a habit that has lasted down through the ages and is said to have its roots in heathen superstition. Today, I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.”
I don’t know another living writer with such a large world view. His compatriot Gustav Mahler said “a symphony must embrace the world.” In his amazing body of prose, Skvorecky has written his own symphony, embracing not only his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility. And as you make Danny Smiricky part of your literary world, you see that this man who can smirk, who can smear the truth when he’s in a tight spot, is one of us – and that everything he and we have done in the course of our ordinary lives matters more than we could have ever dreamed when we were young.
Roberta Silman is the author of Somebody Else’s Child, a children’s book, Blood Relations, a story collection, and the novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning The World Again, and many stories and reviews published here and abroad. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.
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