Pavel Vilikovský, Ever Green Is…: Selected Prose, trans. Charles Sabatos (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 195 pp.
I’ve already reviewed Vilikovský’s Fleeting Snow, which I enjoyed enough to deem the redemption of the literary novel. I should have left well enough alone.
Ever Green Is…, an allusion to a line from Goethe’s Faust, collects one short story and two novellas from the same author. The short story, “Everything I Know about Central Europeanism (with a Little Friendly Help from Olomouc and Camus),” plays with the apparently historical fact that famous French existentalist Albert Camus passed through the Czech Lands at one point in his journeyings. It proposes a number of theses in passing about what it means to be “Central European,” principally to deconstruct them; more an intellectual exercise than a narrative one. Being so short, it is more amusing than aggravating.
As regards the two novellas, however, I’m forced once again to return to a common complaint I’ve had here of contemporary Slovak fiction, which applies to entirely too much contemporary fiction full stop: the narrative craft has either not be learned or has been actively jettisoned without respect or concern for the reader who is paying attention in the currency of the finite minutes of her life. A purely intellectual exercise in story form—fine. Metafiction—not my thing, but I get it. But to pretend to tell a story, without doing the necessary work of storytelling, is an abuse of the reader.
For instance, the titular novella “Ever Green Is…” draws the reader into the megalomaniacal monologuing of the narrator. It’s entertaining for what it is, constantly forking off on another path as the almost-senile protagonist keeps diverting from his point and circling back to it. All of them, in the end, go back to self-aggrandizement, gradually building up a picture of a resoundingly repulsive character. This is further accented by the marginal apparatus of words or phrases that, theoretically, would guide the reader through the narrative; in fact, without exception, they are distractions from the point at hand, always highlighting the least important detail in the sentence—a constant error in judgment that gets funnier as it goes along.
If “Ever Green Is…” kept playing by these rules, I’d have been satisfied with its strategy as character portrait. Instead, at the end, it suddenly decides to have plot, and not just plot but sensational plot. Since by now I’ve no doubt dissuaded you from reading the book, you won’t be disappointed by a spoiler: we find out at the very end that the person addressed throughout the story is in fact the narrator’s long-lost son—a son we didn’t even know existed until the final portion of the tale. We don’t care about the son, frankly; still, the reunion ought to be meaningful or dramatic. Instead, it feels like the unearned punchline to a feeble joke, as it were a desperate last stab at narrative linearity. Needless to say, it left me far more irritated than satisfied. And not ironically, urbanely irritated; just irritated.
How much more in the other novella, “A Horse Upstairs, a Blind Man in Vráble.” We are set up for the narrator’s journey to the town of Vráble, presumably to see a lost love, and on the way we are treated to memories, conversations, and sights. Despite the meandering path of consciousness here as in the previous novella, we’re willing to go along for the ride, curious to see where it will take us. But instead of actually getting anywhere at all, the latter portion of the book veers into the wholly unexpected territory of how the narrator endured the growing dementia of his elderly mother—and then decided to smother her to death. Just like that. No build-up, no consequences, just dropped in to the prose as if another grudging concession to that oppressive requirement of “plot.”
This story was first published in 1989, so at the very bitter end of the communist era, and evidently Vilikovský by and large kept his work to himself until he could publish without censorship. Understandable, then, that it suffered from the lack of exposure and exchange that improves the works of even great literary geniuses. It is notable that the aforementioned Fleeting Snow, published twenty years later, also deals with dementia—and does it an order of magnitude better. “A Horse Upstairs” records a moment in the writer’s development set against its political circumstances, but is better forgotten in favor of its superior successor.