Tag Archives: Slovakia

Book of the month: Jana Beňová

August 29, 2017 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

August is Women in Translation month. The initiative was started four years ago by translator Meytal Radzinski to challenge the gender imbalance in the anglophone publishing industry. This sees works by women making up only around 30 per cent of books originally written in other languages that make it onto English-language bookshop shelves.

As such, I knew I wanted to review a book by a woman writer this month (although I haven’t gone to the same lengths as last August, when I read 17 translated works by women and featured five on this blog in an effort to start to redress the gender imbalance in my own original project). And as #WITmonth (for the Twitterate among you) is all about championing underrepresented voices, it seemed to make sense to seek out a title from a country that is relatively poorly served for translation overall.

Slovakia is such a nation. Although a relatively wide selection of Czech literature is available in English, there is surprisingly little to sample from the country that made up the other half of Czechoslovakia until its dissolution in 1993. Certainly, back in 2012, I found there were very few titles to choose from (although I did enjoy the novel by Peter Pišťánek that I ended up reading).

So I was intrigued to hear about Seeing People Off, the first English-language translation (done by Janet Livingstone) of the work of European Union Prize for Literature-winner Jana Beňová, whose writing, according to US publisher Two Dollar Radio, bears comparison with the Brazilian great Clarice Lispector. Here, surely, was an exciting title to get my teeth into.

At a mere 126 pages, Seeing People Off might seem to be a sliver of a book. Its contents, however, are far from lightweight. Centred around Elza and her partner Ian, who live in a large apartment block in a district of Bratislava, ‘a place where time plays no role’, the narrative consists of telling fragments of their experiences and of the lives that surround them. We hear snatches of their neighbours’ arguments, as well as lines from the conversations of people at nearby tables in the cafés they frequent. Elements of the main characters’ backstories and those of their friends crop up unannounced, crowbarring themselves into the pages in a way that might at first seem chaotic but quickly creates an arresting whole.

The similarities to Lispector’s work are obvious for, as in The Hour of the Star, the story is told in short bursts, giving the text the appearance of a series of feverish notes on existence. There is the same playful oddness that runs through the Brazilian writer’s work: a river swells its banks and threatens to overwhelm the city; childhood imaginary friends tumble into the narrative and begin to act independently; and Elza, who is writing Seeing People Off and reads out extracts from it to her contemporaries now and then, comments wryly on her reasons for cutting down the space she gives to certain people in the tale and the frustrations of the Slovakian publishing industry.

There are oddball comparisons too. We read, for example, that forlorn figures wandering around a half-closed fun fair remind Elza ‘of England in times when they used children as chimney sweeps’.

Much of this quirkiness is funny, but it can be alarming too. Discussions surrounding a reality TV show set in a concentration camp and cold – almost clinical – accounts of violence and suicide inspire unease as the narrative lurches between what is acceptable and what is not, inviting readers to acknowledge and test this boundary within themselves.

The result is a book that seems to operate partly on the subconscious level, dredging up, inverting and reconfiguring ideas, themes and images. As such, it requires careful reading for, suspended on the finest of threads, the narrative is always only an attention lapse or two away from tumbling into nonsense.

For those who persevere, however, the rewards are great. In a very few words, Beňová tugs at the strings that bind conventional narratives, testing the knots and exposing the weaknesses. In so doing, she reveals that sometimes the point of reading might be to lose the thread.

Seeing People Off  by Jana Beňová, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone (Two Dollars Radio, 2017)

Slovakia: the other side

September 17, 2012 By in The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

Mona responded to my Halfway Appeal for countries I have yet to find books from with several interesting ideas. When it came to Slovakia, she suggested Peter Pišťánek’s Rivers of Babylon. There was a good interview with him, in which he talked about the reasons not many Slovak writers have been translated into English, on Three Percent, she said.

This grabbed my attention because I had been puzzling for some time over the scarcity of Slovak writers with work available in English, as compared to the relative plethora of Czech authors who have been translated. Given the disparity, an English-language reader might be forgiven for thinking that nearly all the writers ran east when Czechoslovakia split at the end of 1992.

Personally I’m not sure I buy Peter Pišťánek’s theory that the lack of Slovak literature in translation is down to a perception that the nation is ‘not as exotic. Not “Eastern” enough’. Still, I was intrigued to find the problem that I’d run up against acknowledged by this leading Slovak man of letters, widely claimed as the nation’s most flamboyant and fearless writer. His first work to have made it into English would do nicely for me.

Much like my Czech book, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, the 1991 novel Rivers of Babylon begins with an institutionalised old man, Donath, who has spent his life slaving away in a punishing and solitary physical job until his very thought processes have become warped and shaped by the machines he serves. There, however, the similarities end. Because, unlike Hrabal’s paper compacter Hanta, who is ultimately destroyed by his work, the young man Racz who comes to take over from Donath in the boiler room of the Hotel Ambassador is not easily crushed. Instead of regarding his work heating the building and surrounding businesses through the cruel winter as a moral duty, Racz recognises it as a lever that he can use to raise his own position. Before long, he is holding the luxury hotel and the town around it to ransom, with hilarious, outrageous and deeply disturbing results.

Pišťánek is a master of manipulation. Whether he is describing the embarrassment of international guests who allow themselves to be extorted by the stoker out of fear of committing a cultural faux pas, the preening of the prostitute who falls for a hustler’s story that he is a wealthy doctor, or Racz’s wilful self-delusion that he is working hard for the good of all, the writer reveals how perception is the key to control.

He combines this insight with sharp wit that enables him to deliver killer one-liners and farcical set pieces beneath which sinister currents twist and drag. There is the car-park attendant whose trailer is towed to the middle of nowhere while he sleeps inside it by gypsies bent on fleecing him, the deranged manager forced to camp out in his freezing office and survive on dead dogs, and the former secret policeman who blacks up as part of an attempt to infiltrate Racz’s operation but ends up leaving dirty finger marks everywhere. And every so often there is a line or an image that takes your breath away with its inventiveness – I particularly like the early description of Racz’s thoughts being ‘scattered all over the place like an egg smashed against a wall’, after he has suffered the humiliation that sparks his takeover bid.

But it doesn’t stop there. There is an anarchic side to Pišťánek’s writing that makes it overflow the boundaries of conventional storytelling and flood beyond the limits of the book. This is a story that is undaunted in its ambition to take on and pull apart the corrupt structures of the new Slovak democracy for which the vice-riddled Hotel Ambassador is often only a thinly veiled metaphor – as the tongue-in-cheek quote on the cover suggests:

‘[Expletives deleted] Prime Minister Mečiar of Slovakia‘

And if we non-Slovaks think we can sit back comfortably and enjoy the ride, we’ve got another thing coming. In the personage of the slimy Swedish sex tourist Gunnar Hurensson, we are forced to confront all the common Western prejudices about eastern and central Europeans that are too often allowed to slip by unchallenged.

The result is a furious, hilarious and important book that is among one of the most engrossing things I’ve read all year. Three cheers for Garnett Press for publishing this, the first part of a trilogy. I look forward to reading the rest.

Rivers of Babylon by Peter Pišťánek, translated from the Slovak by Peter Petro (Garnett Press, 2007)