A User’s Manual – Jiří Kolář (tr. Ryan Scott)

Twisted Spoon Press located in Prague, in the Czech Republic, have been a favourite go to publisher, purveyors of quality books, always beautifully produced and presented. It is through them that I discovered Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, when they released her ‘Primeval and Other Times’ (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) back in 2010. I’ve read, and reviewed, ‘Avaries’ by Zuzana Brabcová (translated by Tereza Novická), ‘A Gothic Soul’ by Jiří Karásek (tr. Kirsten Lodge), ‘Dreamverse’ by Jindřich Štyrský (tr. Karel Teige), all of these titles translated from the Czech and ‘I Burn Paris’ by Bruno Jasieński (translated from the Polish by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski). Their catalogue containing works by Franz Kafka, Péter Nádas and Bohumil Hrabal (more on his books later), and I’ve only scratched the surface of their books.

Late last year Twisted Spoon released ‘A User’s Manual’ by Jiří Kolář (translated by Ryan Scott) and, again, it is a stunning book to hold and admire. In 1969 the “action poems” of Jiří Kolář were published in their complete from and paired with fifty-two collages taken from Weekly 1967. These collages were visual commentary for a major event for each week of the year.

The collages…are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, scarps of letters, reports, and decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of “evidential” report on the year.

These collages have been reproduced in this new publication, on facing pages to fifty-two absurd poems which “mock the officialese rampant in communist society while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given instructions.”

As soon as I entered Jiří Kolář’s dizzying world I was reminded of Eduardo Levé’s ‘Works’ a book containing a list of 533 artistic projects “conceived but not realized by its author” or Mario Bellatin’s ‘The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin” a list of “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” presented as part of dOCUMENTA(13). Absurdist ideas but ones when you dwell long enough see some crystal of sanity.

Week 21

FREE ENTRY

Into an abandoned shed
bare cellar
or emptied garage
place a laid table
a log with embedded axe
overturned washtubs
and a coop for geese
On one wall hang a wreath
on another a gutted picture
on a third an overcoat
on a fourth newspapers in their holders

Attach a sign about the entrance
FREE ENTRY

In this current climate of social isolation, a number of these bizarre instructions could actually form a list of activities to keep you occupied for a whole year ahead!!!

Week 45

NEVER AGAIN

Get on a tram
or bus
and focus intently on
the vibrations beneath your feet
the sounds inside and out
the life all around
the presence of others
recall how many times you’ve travelled
where to and from and with whom
guess what someone is thinking
what he’s experienced
what he reads what dream he’s harboured
retain somewhere in memory
enough room

for

what you would like to happen to you
what annoys you
what you’ve forgotten
and meanwhile keep listening
to your thoughts asking
what you would do
if you knew
you’d never go home again

I’ve presented only two examples of the poems, to give you a taste of the instructions, the “user’s manual”, each one something you could perform or at least contemplate the performance. The collection twists and turns through the banality of living under a communist regime, the repetitiveness of daily existence and then it shakes you out of the dullness, celebrating simple items, like an axe in a block of wood, or a newspaper.

Each of the accompanying artworks are also to be contemplated slowly, their composition miniscule but perfect, order coming from the chaos, articulation of world events. They alone could make up a book, but it is through the alignment of small acts of insurrection and art of social commentary that the repetitiveness seeps through.

 

Jiří Kolář was born at the start of WWI (1914) and in 1953 was imprisoned for nine months, after one of his manuscripts, Prométheova Játra, was found in a fellow poet’s house. His work covered Surrealism and Avant-Garde movements and a more detailed explanation of his life, work and cultural significance can be found at this article on ‘Culture Trip’

Artworks presented are the facing pages to Week 28 and Week 41.

The book also contains the text of the original Czech poems as an appendix.

Aviaries – Zuzana Brabcová (tr. Tereza Novická)

In his “Preface” to ‘L’Assommoir’ Émile Zola claimed the novel “is a work of truth, the first novel about the common people that does not lie and that smells of the common people. And readers should not conclude that the common people as a whole are bad, for my characters are not bad, they are only ignorant and ruined by the conditions of sweated toil and poverty in which they live.”

The protagonist narrator of Zuzana Brabcová’s last novel, ‘Aviaries’, Alžběta is a common person, and is linked inextricably to Émile Zola’s ‘L’Assommoir’;

Underneath the mattress

The trap snapped shut and firmly clamped around my memory. On February 18,1961, my mom had wedged a book underneath my mattress to make sure I’d be sleeping on a flat surface. She forgot about it. Hanging from a long string, a monkey-shaped rattle quivered above me, and I didn’t take my eyes off it for a single moment. They say the blind live in time, not space. If that’s true, I was a blind person back then. All of Grandpa’s clocks ticked away within my veins, and in my left hemisphere, my grandma diced apples from the garden for strudel.
Mom’s friend later took the crib for her own child. She discovered the forgotten book underneath the mattress. It was Zola’s L’Assommoir. (p69)

Whilst Zola’s “project is indebted to the Positivist philosopher’s isolation of three principal determinants on human behavior: heredity, environment, and the historical moment”, Zuzana Brabcová’s novel adds in the influence of literature, literally sleeping on a book, which can determine behavior and in this case fate.

‘Aviaries’ is a collection of fragments, labelled from December 20, 2011 to February 19, 2015, however they are not simply diary entries, there are recollections, newspaper headlines, interior monologues, dreams, excerpts from prose, poetry and psalms (including a passage from C.G. Jung’s essay on the “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore” from 1951 and Oliver Sack’s “An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995). This is a work full of contradictions, that move the reader in contradictory directions, from anger to empathy within a paragraph. It is not unusual for a sentence to spin off in a tangent. All adding to the fragmentary nature of the book;

This frightens me: what if disintegration into prime elements, the fragmentation into particulars, is also true for other phenomena, and reality will churn before my eyes in an incomprehensible muddle? (p78)

Our narrator is from the fringes, being treated for mental illness, recently made redundant with no prospect of reemployment – although she tries – she spends her days emailing her dumpster diving daughter – who is going out with Bob Dylan – and sharing her time and space with a homeless alcoholic who has had “a tumor the size if a lemon removed from his brain”, a soul mate, Melda, who she met in the neurological ward of the local hospital.

“I have no money,” I said to keep the conversation going. “I have no money, no job, no family. Apart from Alice, that is, who’s found lifelong lover in the flap of a discarded wallet in a dumpster, and my sister, Nadia, whose sets all burned down.”
And suddenly, with no warning, Doctor Gnuj quite unexpectedly fixed on me his brown-pink gaze, matching the waiting room, the gaze of a polyp: “Your inner world is like that basement lair of yours. Kick down the doors, file through the bars! Do you even notice the world around you?”
I do. Don’t you worry. I know well enough what the world around me lives for: the season of wine tastings and exhibitions of corpses. (pgs 31-32)

A deeply moving work of social exclusion, it is akin to William Kennedy’s ‘Ironweed’ on magic mushrooms, a melancholic work where we wonder if there is to be any redemption for the narrator as she slips further and further into decline.

Most of the fragments are at the most two pages long and this broken collection of seemingly disparate parts is well suited to exploring a life on the edges, where the kaleidoscopic motes blur the lines between fantasy and reality. As the publisher’s notes say “to testify to what it is like to be alone and lost and indignant in a world that has stopped making sense.”

And suddenly I recall how my mom took me to see a psychologist once, I was twelve or thirteen and maybe ever weirder back then than I am now, I don’t really remember, even memory is just a play of colors and shapes behind eyelids shut in a desire for non-existence. He showed me some pictures, ink blots symmetrical along a vertical axis running through the center of the card. Did it remind me of anything? Was I supposed to let my imagination run wild? What swaddled dimensions, what unknowable universes existed back then, just like today, between my mental images and the words I was forced to use to express them?
Indeed: the infamous Rorschach test.
“A blot,” I told the psychologist when he showed me the first card, but I imagined horse shit on a forest path, which was very strange, given the path was so narrow, no horse could possibly squeeze its way down it.
“Okay, but what does the blot remind you of?”
“A blot.”
“And this picture?”
“A blot. A blot. A blot.”
It reminded me of the noble profile of Old Shatterhand’s face, it reminded me of a human brain and a singed map of Prague, it reminded me of…But why in the world should I tell him that? Just like today, I stubbornly insisted on words quite different to those bursting inside me like bubbles on the water’s surface.
Melda’s lying on a foam mattress and drinking no euro-rotgut but the good Chilean wine he’d given me for my birthday. He drinks it all in one go, being an alcoholic. And me? A blot. Behind the closed eyelids of God knows who. Blots. (p52)

Zuzana Brabcová has taken the three principal determinants on human behavior: heredity, environment, and the historical moment, from Zola’s ‘L’Assommoir’, set the tale in modern day Prague and blended these into an experimental “morass of the bizarre and the grotesque”. At times the protagonist Alžběta is referred to in the third person, others the first, omniscient overlaid with monologue, this approach forcing to reader to recoil, but then to embrace.

‘Aviaries’ was the winner of the Josef Škvorecký Award, a Czech language award in 2016 for the best prose of the year, unfortunately Zuzana Brabcová had died soon after completing this work. A social commentary on the political state in Prague and the ill treatment of socially disadvantaged people, this is a powerful and lingering book.

As Émile Zola says (again) in his Preface to ‘L’Assommoir’; “ I wanted to depict the inexorable downfall of a working-class family in the poisonous atmosphere of our industrial suburbs. Intoxication and idleness lead to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, to the progressive neglect of decent feeling and ultimately to degradation and death. It is simply morality in action.”

Whist Zola has a simple linear narrative arc, a moral story of decline into squalor, Zuzana Brabcová starts us deeply immersed in the mire, the opening fragment at sunset;

December 20, 2011

It arrives around four, five o’clock in the afternoon, hangs around until about seven, and then at night it reigns. It’s been that way for years, I don’t recall it ever having been any different. A day devoted to staying in is the music of a melody nobody has ever played. And when I do have to go out, there’s a bloom coating the people I pass, a frost blurring their features. I can imagine they don’t exist, and in this way I love them. All that exists: just disrupts and mars, as if somebody had graffiti-tagged The Night Watch.
Václav Havel died the day before yesterday. In his sleep, in the morning. So its reign extends beyond the night.

The book starting the in the days after the first President of the Czech Republic’s death. Even the reference to Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ pervades the opening with darkness, will there be an escape from the gloom?

Brabcová draws on a number of Zola references;

and she looked along the outer boulevards, to the left and to the right, her eyes pausing at either end, filled with a nameless dread, as if, from now on, her life would be lived out within this space, bounded by a slaughterhouse and a hospital. (‘L’Assommoir’ p33)

No, I really can’t complain about where I live. I have a complete range of public facilities nearby: two hospitals, numerous pharmacies, a cemetery, even a crematorium. (‘Aviaries’)

A highlight of my recent reading journey and yet again a great publication from Twisted Spoon Press in Prague. Now I have read Zuzana Brabcová’s final novel I am eagerly awaiting more of her work to appear in English, ‘Rok Perel’ apparently the first Czech novel to deal with lesbian love, set in a psychiatric hospital it deals with an adult woman’s love for a young girl. Her first novel ‘Daleko od stromu’ was published in 1984 in Cologne and Zuzana Brabcová was the first recipient of the Jiří Orten Award in 1987, a prize established to raise the profile of authors whose works had been rejected by the regime. Her work ‘Stropy’ (‘Ceilings’) won the Magnesia Litera in 2013, the title referring to the thing which people hospitalised in psychiatric clinics see most often – a ceiling. All of these blurbs (taken from the Czech Lit website), look most appealing indeed, let’s hope some translators are on the case.

I think it is going to take something special for this book not to remain at the top of my highlights for 2019 and if you enjoy works that push the boundaries, books that examine the fringes, mysterious, grotesque and hallucinatory works then I suggest you order a copy of this post haste.

Copy courtesy of the publisher Twisted Spoon Press.

 

Dreamverse – Jindřich Štyrský (tr. Jed Slast)

I’ve never really contemplated the thought that another’s dreams could pervade my own. Literature is overloaded with dream references, thinly veiled references to an unconscious mind, or a sub-plot or even prophecy. However, Jindřich Štyrský’s ‘Dreamverse’, a collection of poems, prose, sketches, collages and paintings does not use the “dream” as a literary device, it is the core subject matter.

The original ‘Dreams’, published posthumously in 1970, was a dream journal spanning the interwar period, and this new release from Twisted Spoon Press, includes Jindřich Štyrský’s 1940’s original layout of full colour and half tone images, and texts, and also includes his sole volume of published poetry and twenty-three essays, articles, speeches and manifestos. It is the dream journal and the poems that insert themselves into your own mind, only to come resurfacing as you attempt to sleep. The essays and articles giving further context to his practice and production and stirring a pot or two along the way.

As always with Twisted Spoon Press publications, this is a beautifully presented book, the images reproduced alongside the dream prose is more akin to an art book than a literary work.

The dreams so vividly recalled that they pervaded my own sleep, and I can assure you that these are not idyllic dreams of stunning landscapes or love, there are images of decapitations, deformities, haunted houses, tattooed infants, tiny hands;

Dream of the Deserted House
(SUMMER 1940)

I am standing in front of an old derelict house built of rough stone, unplastered.
The windows and door are boarded up. I walk around it to see if there might be a way in. When I’ve walked around three sides, I notice on the eastern side, where the house abuts a garden, female legs protruding from the wall. As if a woman has been immured here. A stocking and a show cover one leg, and the other has been picked clean to the bone. I want to get into the house. Bears. I rip one of the boards from a window and break into the house. Then I barricade the window and am satisfied I’m safe. I lie down on a bed and sleep. – – A particular noise jolts me from the dream – – – maybe it was my regular breathing. Light enters the room, and in a corner above me, above the bed, are giant cobwebs, dense, as if hundreds of years old, but instead of spiders there are two copulating frogs – – –breathing deeply – – –

(p107)

The poems are complex, haunting and disturbing, reflecting the surrealist, cubist, and/or artificialist views of Jindřich Štyrský, the collection presenting twenty-four poems, again the paradoxes continue, maidens wearing coats made from their own skin, swine, elephants, tombs and cemeteries;

Only Harps Now Love Silence

A toad sleeping on a clock
A clock showing toad time

Everything happens under turbid water
Where maidens sit reading
Under green water
Luckily
Coats of their own skin
Made whenever we wish

Expensive skin

But when the eye of God looks on us toads
I’ll take delight
In we toads clad in the fur of divine mice
Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

(p134)

The book is presented firstly with the Dreams prose, with artworks, followed by the poetry collection, and closes with Jindřich Štyrský’s other writings. And it is through this final section of the book that historical placement, explanations of his work and a deeper understanding of the earlier sections comes to the fore. Although some of the writings also leap into a surrealist world;

there is no reason to attach importance to anything in this text
it matters very little to us if you deteriorate by old age or paralysis others shall bring us joy
(p153)

The reflections on poetry, poetics, fellow artists, art and form are very enlightening. Jindřich Štyrský’s artistic partner was Marie Čerinová (Toyen) and in the 1920’s they exhibited works in Paris and founded their own movement “Artificialism”. Founding, along with Toyen, Bohuslav Brouk, and Vitezslav Nezval, the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia and returned to Paris at the invitation of the Paris Surrealists. His writings used to comment freely, and at times controversially, on the movements at the time.

Poets, for the most part, are fools. They’re content with rubbing against maidens when they could be triumphing over singing cows. (p194-195)

No one is easier to get drunk than a poet, and the cheapest way is on violet perfume. Poetry will remain modern as long as it doesn’t pick a fight with the new worldview. (p195)

Yet the poet will experience success only when he quits shocking the public. (p195)

A few years ago, the French Journal L’Esprit nouveau ran a survey that asked if the Louvre should be burned down. The question incited the entire global milieu of cultural snobs, and many artists, philosophers, art dealers, and others responded for or against the idea. Those who were in favour of burning down the Louvre, and they were by and large the very top poets and artists from around the world, often found themselves in a rather unenviable position. In one well-known incident, Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada and one of the greatest contemporary poets, was assaulted at Café de la Rotonde by students of the School of Fine Arts in Paris.
In my opinion, the existence of the Louvre today, with its celebrated Mona Lisa’s smile and ranks of mouldy canvases, restored a hundred times over, depicting outmoded Madonnas, pastoral idylls, and all that allurement bereft of historical context, means little. If the Louvre ceased to exist it would truly be a major loss since we would no longer be able to behold those lovely English ladies staring starry-eyed at the nudes of Giorgione and Titan, but it would hardly be an irreplaceable loss as we live our adventures in front of canvases much more fascinating, intoxicated by the gaze that has escaped the lidded eyes of sultry Greta Garbo and Brigitte Helm. The faces of worldly beauties and chaste Renaissance Madonnas are so vapid, expressionless, entirely devoid of passion, that to us they seen like decaying junk and a tedious bore. (p165)

Jindřich Štyrský’s ‘Dreamverse’ is part artwork, part diary, part poetic and part historical artefact, a work that pervades your own subconscious and plants seeds of nightmares, whilst also giving historical context to the art movements that Jindřich Štyrský was associated with, another fine addition to my collection of surrealist tinged works and yet again a fine example of the quality publications produced by Twisted Spoon Press in Prague.

Photos of some of the artworks are available on the publisher’s Facebook Page

Twelve Days of Messenger’s Blog – Day Four

Down to the last four favourite works of 2016. This one from a few years ago, Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. A few blogs featuring this work recently and a feature film about to be released. Here’s what I wrote back in June:

The amazing publication “Music and Literature” featured celebrated writer Dubravka Ugreśić in their 6th edition and she said, in an interview with Daniel Medin “We should remember here that at least two titles, which have imagined the future of books unforgettably. One of them is a monument to the literary landscape, the novel Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal (masterfully translated by Michael Henry Helm). It is the best book about books that I know of.” As regular visitors here would know, it doesn’t take much for me to source a referenced work, especially if it is by an author I have previously read, and with a recommendation that it is “the best book about books” I had no hesitation in reading “Too Loud A Solitude” as soon as a copy arrived in my mailbox.

Our protagonist is Haňt’a, a manual labourer, who has been compacting wastepaper for the last thirty-five years, as the opening of each chapter attests, “For thirty-five years now I have been compacting wastepaper” (actually it is slightly differently worded for each chapter, but the general idea is the same, even though the slight change of words actually alludes to something different each time). His boss sees Haňt’a as a beer swilling imbecile, but Haňt’a has a secret, he has been rescuing great books, reading classics, and he is learned in a vast array of literature.

Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in my like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

To read Hrabal is also to savour language, to sip on the words, the structure, the knowledge, the illusion. This is a short work, but very much like Haňt’a’s hydraulic press, Hrabal has compacted an awful lot into 98 pages. Working underground, in a police state, all day in a cellar, drinking vast amounts of alcohol and, when he has the time, going to his home, a construction completely filled with books (so much so even tons of books teeter over Haňt’a ‘s bed).  He is even shrinking under the weight of his books, is this a mental burden or a physical one? Horror tales of the manual labour are blended with the celebration of printed works themselves:

Today for the first time I noticed I’d stopped looking out for the mice, the nests, their families. When I throw in blind baby mice, the mother jumps in after them, sticks by them, and shares the fate of my classics and wastepaper. You wouldn’t believe how many mice there are in a cellar like mine, two hundred, five hundred maybe, most of them friendly little creatures born half-blind, but there is one thing we have in common, namely, a vital need for literature with a marked preference for Goethe and Schiller in Morocco bindings.

Chapter four doesn’t open with the “For thirty-five years..” instead jumping straight to an opening scene of blood;

One afternoon the slaughterhouse people brought me a truckload of bloodstained paper and blood-drenched boxes, crate after crate of the stuff, which I couldn’t stand, because it had that sickly sweet smell to it and left me as gory as a butcher’s apron. By way of revenge I piously placed and open Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam into the first bale, a Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller into the second, and, that the word might be made bloody flesh, an Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche into the third. And as I worked, a host, a swarm of those dreadful flesh flies the butchers had brought with them from the slaughterhouse buzzed around my head, attacking my face like a hailstorm.

Later the writers visit Haňt’a in his dreams. “In Praise of Folly” by Erasmus is an essay that is a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society as well as the Roman Catholic Church, “Don Carlos” by Friedrich Schiller an historical tragedy in five acts that is set in the Spanish Court at Aranjuez and explores the conflict between Don Carlos and this father, King Philip II, and “Ecce Homo” by Friedrich Nietzsche, subtitled “How One Becomes What One Is” a work where Nietzsche offered his own perspective on his work as a philosopher as well as a human being. As previous Hrabal books have explored, through long rambling sentences, he can pack al lot into a short space, here a single paragraph giving a wealth of works to explore, correlations, references, links.

But the inclusion of compacted reference or classic works into bales of wastepaper is not only Haňt’a’s forte, he decorates the bales with reproductions of artworks on the outside, the reality of his disgraceful surroundings and meaningless work, beautified by major works of art, Van Gough, Gauguin. This juxtaposition a feature throughout:

Depressed, burdened with guilt, I made my way down to the cellar and lay on my back in the hollow still warm from the Gypsy girl in the turquoise skirt, I lay there listening to the sounds of the street, the beautiful concrete music of the street, and the dripping and flushing of wastewater that was constantly running through the five-story building above us, to toilet chains being pulled, listening to what was going on below, clearly hearing the far-off flow of wastewater and feces through the sewers, and far beneath the surface – now that the flesh flies’ legions had beat a fast retreat – the keening and mournful squeaking of the two armies of rats battling throughout the sewers of the capital, battling for supremacy over the sewers of Prague. Neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below – or within me. Bonjour, M. Gauguin!

Bonjour, M. Gauguinan artwork by Paul Gauguin, a work set in the bright outdoors, not in a cellar with the flies, mice, sewers.

As progress, and an efficient communist state, comes into being, the future of conveyor belts holding entire print runs, turning the anonymous books into pulp becomes a reality, the books unceremoniously being “tossed, their naked insides on the belt, and it didn’t matter what page they fell open to, nobody ever looked into them…” With parallels to Nazi Germany and the concentration camps, there is a connection between Haňt’a and the camps but you’ll need to read this yourself to discover it, the section is set to the delivery of Immanuel Kant’s “The Metaphysics of Morals”….

Haňt’a’s favourite book? Seneca’s “On Tranquillity of Mind” – another to explore?

Another masterful work from Hrabal, one I thoroughly enjoyed, a book that, like our protagonist, compacts an awful lot into a short space. Thanks to Dubravka Ugreśić for her recommendation.

 

 

Too Loud A Solitude – Bohumil Hrabal (translated by Michael Henry Heim)

The amazing publication “Music and Literature” featured celebrated writer Dubravka Ugreśić in their 6^th edition and she said, in an interview with Daniel Medin “We should remember here that at least two titles, which have imagined the future of books unforgettably. One of them is a monument to the literary landscape, the novel Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal (masterfully translated by Michael Henry Helm). It is the best book about books that I know of.” As regular visitors here would know, it doesn’t take much for me to source a referenced work, especially if it is by an author I have previously read, and with a recommendation that it is “the best book about books” I had no hesitation in reading “Too Loud A Solitude” as soon as a copy arrived in my mailbox.

Our protagonist is Haňt’a, a manual labourer, who has been compacting wastepaper for the last thirty-five years, as the opening of each chapter attests, “For thirty-five years now I have been compacting wastepaper” (actually it is slightly differently worded for each chapter, but the general idea is the same, even though the slight change of words actually alludes to something different each time). His boss sees Haňt’a as a beer swilling imbecile, but Haňt’a has a secret, he has been rescuing great books, reading classics, and he is learned in a vast array of literature.

Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in my like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

To read Hrabal is also to savour language, to sip on the words, the structure, the knowledge, the illusion. This is a short work, but very much like Haňt’a’s hydraulic press, Hrabal has compacted an awful lot into 98 pages. Working underground, in a police state, all day in a cellar, drinking vast amounts of alcohol and, when he has the time, going to his home, a construction completely filled with books (so much so even tons of books teeter over Haňt’a ‘s bed).  He is even shrinking under the weight of his books, is this a mental burden or a physical one? Horror tales of the manual labour are blended with the celebration of printed works themselves:

Today for the first time I noticed I’d stopped looking out for the mice, the nests, their families. When I throw in blind baby mice, the mother jumps in after them, sticks by them, and shares the fate of my classics and wastepaper. You wouldn’t believe how many mice there are in a cellar like mine, two hundred, five hundred maybe, most of them friendly little creatures born half-blind, but there is one thing we have in common, namely, a vital need for literature with a marked preference for Goethe and Schiller in Morocco bindings.

Chapter four doesn’t open with the “For thirty-five years..” instead jumping straight to an opening scene of blood;

One afternoon the slaughterhouse people brought me a truckload of bloodstained paper and blood-drenched boxes, crate after crate of the stuff, which I couldn’t stand, because it had that sickly sweet smell to it and left me as gory as a butcher’s apron. By way of revenge I piously placed and open Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam into the first bale, a Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller into the second, and, that the word might be made bloody flesh, an Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche into the third. And as I worked, a host, a swarm of those dreadful flesh flies the butchers had brought with them from the slaughterhouse buzzed around my head, attacking my face like a hailstorm.

Later the writers visit Haňt’a in his dreams. “In Praise of Folly” by Erasmus is an essay that is a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society as well as the Roman Catholic Church, “Don Carlos” by Friedrich Schiller an historical tragedy in five acts that is set in the Spanish Court at Aranjuez and explores the conflict between Don Carlos and this father, King Philip II, and “Ecce Homo” by Friedrich Nietzsche, subtitled “How One Becomes What One Is” a work where Nietzsche offered his own perspective on his work as a philosopher as well as a human being. As previous Hrabal books have explored, through long rambling sentences, he can pack al lot into a short space, here a single paragraph giving a wealth of works to explore, correlations, references, links.

But the inclusion of compacted reference or classic works into bales of wastepaper is not only Haňt’a’s forte, he decorates the bales with reproductions of artworks on the outside, the reality of his disgraceful surroundings and meaningless work, beautified by major works of art, Van Gough, Gauguin. This juxtaposition a feature throughout:

Depressed, burdened with guilt, I made my way down to the cellar and lay on my back in the hollow still warm from the Gypsy girl in the turquoise skirt, I lay there listening to the sounds of the street, the beautiful concrete music of the street, and the dripping and flushing of wastewater that was constantly running through the five-story building above us, to toilet chains being pulled, listening to what was going on below, clearly hearing the far-off flow of wastewater and feces through the sewers, and far beneath the surface – now that the flesh flies’ legions had beat a fast retreat – the keening and mournful squeaking of the two armies of rats battling throughout the sewers of the capital, battling for supremacy over the sewers of Prague. Neither the heavens are humane nor is life above or below – or within me. Bonjour, M. Gauguin!

Bonjour, M. Gauguinan artwork by Paul Gauguin, a work set in the bright outdoors, not in a cellar with the flies, mice, sewers.

As progress, and an efficient communist state, comes into being, the future of conveyor belts holding entire print runs, turning the anonymous books into pulp becomes a reality, the books unceremoniously being “tossed, their naked insides on the belt, and it didn’t matter what page they fell open to, nobody ever looked into them…” With parallels to Nazi Germany and the concentration camps, there is a connection between Haňt’a and the camps but you’ll need to read this yourself to discover it, the section is set to the delivery of Immanuel Kant’s “The Metaphysics of Morals”….

Haňt’a’s favourite book? Seneca’s “On Tranquillity of Mind” – another to explore?

Another masterful work from Hrabal, one I thoroughly enjoyed, a book that, like our protagonist, compacts an awful lot into a short space. Thanks to Dubravka Ugreśić for her recommendation.

The Festival Of Insignificance – Milan Kundera (translated by Linda Asher)

After a fourteen/fifteen year hiatus Milan Kundera, now aged 86, has returned. His last published novel was “L’Ignorance” (‘Ignorance”) in 2000 and therefore the arrival of “La fête de l’insignifiance” (“The Festival Of Insignificance”) meant a trip to the bookshop was in order. Many readers would be aware of his best-selling novel “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” (“Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí”), from mid 1980’s, written in Czech before he switched to French.

Kundera is a meditator on the melancholy; his works are generally filled with little gems that you have to sort from the worthless deposits that surround them. And his latest very slim work is no different. However when you have limited alluvium the gems are hardly worth recovering, the effort is too great for too small a reward. My edition runs to 115 pages, the font is larger than usual, there are many blank pages between the seven parts so in total we are possibly looking at 50-60 pages of text.

In Enrique Vila-Matas’ “The Illogic Of Kassel” (translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom) we have the concept of McGuffin’s, a red-herring in the text that keeps you reading, a trap, something to hook the reader in, a devise which has little to do with the plot, but allows the story to advance. “The Festival of Insignificance” is full of McGuffins.

Part one of our work is called “Introducing the heroes” and opens with Alain meditating on the navel, as young girls walk around Paris with a “naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short.” A book that is going to contemplate the navel? Be warned… of course this section introduces us to the dramatis personae, a group of friends, acquaintances who at some stage will also contemplate insignificance.

Part two “the Marionette Theatre” gives us the story of Stalin relaying his tale of shooting 24 partridges, it is a joke, but Khrushchev treats it with distain – Stalin is lying:

After a moment Charles said: “Time moves on. Because of time, first we’re alive – which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witness now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes. Friends, I am fascinated by that story Khrushchev tells in his memoirs. And I cannot shake off the urge to draw on it and invent a play for the marionette theatre.”

As our story builds momentum you suddenly find the story cut off by what seem trivial events, are these ticks, will the whole come into focus before our book is done?  One of Stalin’s advisers, Kalinin, suffers from an enlarged prostrate, causing him to be unable to hold his pee, part of Stalin’s humour included lengthy dissertations to amuse himself on Kalinin’s discomfort. We then learn of this association through the bizarre naming of a city Kaliningrad.

To hell with the so-called great men whose names adorn our streets. They all became famous through their ambitions, their vanity, their lies, their cruelty. Kalinin is the only one whose name will live on in memory of an ordeal that every human being has experienced, in memory of a desperate battle that brought misery on no one but himself.

Our book is peppered with insignificant events, which are then debated, for example Alain is bumped by a rude woman walking in the opposite direction, he apologises:

“Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty – I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just attack each other the minute they see them. SO instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on the other. The one who managed to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose. You’re walking along the street, lost in thought. Along comes a girl, walking straight ahead as if she were the only person in the world, looking neither left nor right. You jostle one another. And there it is, the moment of truth: Who’s going to bawl out the other person, and who’s going to apologize? It’s a classic situation: Actually, each of them is both the jostled and the jostler. And yet some people always – immediately, spontaneously – consider themselves the jostlers, thus in the wrong. And others always – immediately, spontaneously – consider themselves the jostled ones, therefore in the right, quick to accuse the other and get him punished. What about you – in that situation, would you apologize or accuse?”

The impossibility/insignificance of language is also explored, through a character Caliban, named after the “savage” in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, he is actually an actor who to remain aloof, has created his own language, he becomes an actor without an audience. Using this invented “Pakistani” he ends up in conversation with a Portuguese maid, of course the concept is just absurd.

I have just reviewed Enrique’s Vila-Matas’ “Bartleby & Co.” (translated by Johnathan Dunne), where the ‘literature of the No” is explored in a book with no text, a novel of footnotes. And to delve straight into this book I suddenly found myself with a number of references to this literature of the No:

…the greatness of this very great poet who, out of his humble veneration of poetry, had vowed never to write a single line.

“You understand, my play for marionettes, it’s just a game, a crazy idea, I’m not writing it, I’m just imagining it,”

This is a small work, a limited work, an insignificant work, but isn’t that the point? Reality, existence aren’t they insignificant?