2024-08-18 14:10:54
As if a meteorite had fallen into the peaceful basin. It seemed that contemporary Czech novels could no longer be about anything other than family relationships, in which trauma from the past intervenes, a demon comes to life in a person, or the one who is different suffers because of his otherness.
But suddenly we read about a town on the edge of the monarchy, where the locals walk on the surface of a pond, break blocks of stone by playing an iron pipe, and wolves go to the village on Sunday mornings to watch over homes with children when the parents are at church. Angels here have such big wings that it is difficult for them to sit in the box.
These scenes are offered by Miroslav Hlauč’s late first work called Letnice, which was recently published by the Paseka publishing house. The 57-year-old author was born in Slovakia, studied clinical pharmacy and, in addition, directing at Prague’s DAMU or film science at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. He works in the field of medical research, but he spends his time outside the laboratory or congress hall writing for years. Czech, i.e. in an acquired, non-native language. It’s as if he too fell here from ancient times, to which the phrase “Renaissance personality” refers.
Fifty-seven-year-old Miroslav Hlaučo is a late debutante. | Photo: Matej Senft
On the first pages, Hlauč’s prose can seem like a god-awful phantasmagoria. We find ourselves in the Pentecost season of 1903. The mountain town of Svatý Jiří lies forgotten on the side of lazy rivers and wide plains.
Thanks to the fact that the narrator can look into the local chronicle, which is written by the priest Methodius the Forty-Three and was also written by previous Methodiuses, we gradually penetrate into the imaginary world. It radiates the magic of magical realism, as the novels of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner for literature Gabriel García Márquez used to be called, but transferred to a Central European style. In some ways, it reminds of the prose of Bruno Schulz, and in some ways, the older films of Juraj Jakubisk.
Saint George has its own rules. When the locals ran out of names from the calendars, they started naming children after book characters. And by coincidence, the names are “talking”, so they transfer a lot of the original images to the bearer: Odysseus the Shepherd is therefore the only one from St. George to go on a long-term journey around the world, until the locals already think he is dead and create an empty grave for him. But he returns in that very year 1903, and we can thus watch another return of Odysseus, which is also a Christian resurrection.
Odysseus not only arrived enriched with wealth and experience, but also with the knowledge that the good old world was sadly coming to an end. He understands that the expansion of monarchist official and industrial power will reach St. George with its tentacles. And they are trying to prepare the natives here for the fact that they will have to give up a little more, because it is incompatible with the age of reason and exact sciences.
“And why can’t everything stay as it is? As it is, it’s good! Or not?” asks one of the locals. “They would think we were fools, they would come to look at us like the toothless bear at the carousel outside the city.” – “The world out there is crazy, but it’s outnumbered, and it’s pushing its way here!” answer those who already guess from newspapers or stories. And Odysseus sadly knows: “They are the world. And we are the strange ones to the world.”
And so the order of modern times comes to St. George. Some lament that centuries ago, during the Tatar invasions, the planned walls should have been built and isolated the mountain town from the world, but it is too late for that now.
The heralded progress of the new century brings with it the erosion of community belonging. It is replaced by the benefit of those who work their way up without considerations and scruples. Mojžíš Krčmář, who for decades subsidized the operation of the local pub from his fortune, which he came to by lucky chance and not quite honestly, has to learn the hard way to make money from customers. The hunter will no longer kill the game with an agreement and an excuse, but with a rifle, even if he is afraid that he will shoot someone with it.
The whole village is deciding whether to accept the novelties only at face value and pretend to be them when tourists or officials arrive, or to identify with them. The new era also seems quite tempting: the uncivilized emotional world of the 19th century has apparently ended, so the military barracks in the district town are being demolished and transformed into a sanatorium for the mentally ill, as the teachings of Sigmund Freud are already spreading in Vienna.
At the same time, none of the protagonists knows what every reader knows: that in ten years the really big war is yet to come.
So in Pentecost we read about the beginning of the modern era more than 100 years ago. But it is not at all difficult to update this aspect – it also addresses our current fears about the future. Every such change requires first giving up the original and only then seeing what is new. We are taking a step into the unknown, but we have no idea where the next ones will lead. They have Odysseus in St. George, but even he only guesses.
However, Miroslav Hlaučo did not write the first plan allegory. At first glance, the novel has an admirable style – that kind of handwriting, where every sentence sounds, is carefully thought out and only then written. Thanks to which he really tells the story: sometimes he quickly advances the plot, other times he makes an intertextual or situational joke, and other times he delights with an unexpected idea or twist.
The entire setting of the story of the resurrection in the Pentecost period remarkably plays with the biblical New Testament description of Christ’s fate and his mission, which was hope. But also the awareness that the course of things is given, that what has to happen must happen. At the same time, the book uses the archetypal story of two brothers fighting for one girl, playing with many realities and historical events. Everything here is multidimensional, opulent, sophisticated. Even completely against the grain of contemporary Czech prose: no overblown feelings and emotional reactions; instead, empathy, the joy of literary play, the experiment. Here, one does not swallow while reading, here one savors every bite.
A less wise writer would have taken the story to the stage where modern times had actually come to St George. So that even a lazy reader can understand how it turned out. Hlaučo stops the action at the moment when everything is ready and the locals can open the gate. Since we know what the 20th century brought, we can guess the rest. The narrator leaves the Dryáčnik depiction of the destruction to our imagination.
Hlauč’s Pentecost is so naked in thorns. As if the present did not offer enough problematic topics to deal with, committed critics may argue that literature is supposed to fix the problems of our lives. Miroslav Hlaučo probably knows that books can’t do anything like that, because those who need correction will never read them. Literature can only show us the world in a new and better way, thus expanding our sensitivity. This novel does that to a great extent.
Miroslav Hlaučo: Pentecost – Remembering the end of the world
Publishing house Paseka 2024, 384 pages, 399 crowns.