Richard, Gaudeamus, trans. David Short (London: Jantar, 2018), 258 pp.
Unlike a number of other recent Slovak novels in English, this one I actually liked. Only I’m not quite sure that it’s a novel.
There may not be a word for it. “Experiment” would make it sound more impenetrable than it actually is, and duller—but by the end I couldn’t put it down. It boasts in turn a panoply of genres without ever making a decisive play for one over another. Part literary rumination, part crime fiction; a dose of sci fi here, a dash of fantasy there, a substrate of surrealism throughout; and a degeneration into wishful thinking that may, in fact, mask autobiography.
That last potential fact, revealed only in the translator’s afterword, significantly ratchets up the tension of the obviously unreliable narrators of the book itself. The author, you’ll notice, goes by only his (first?) name Richard, and identifies himself only as “a Slovak doctor working in London.” I’ve dealt in this series with other marginally qualifying Slovak novels in English (like The Ugly, Out of This Furnace, and Dragon Castle), but this may be the most marginal yet: in its original Slovak version it exists only in a post-communist samizdat edition—apparently because its critique of “democratic” Slovakia was a little too hot to handle—so it’s only this English translation that exists in any official public format.
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Furthermore, the inciting incident of the manifold stories and voices within the book is a real crime: the abduction of a young woman named Ľudmila Cervanová in 1976. She was presumed murdered. It’s still not clear if a body was actually found, if it was actually hers, or if her father actually identified it—and morever, the body said to have been found was cremated shortly after its alleged autopsy. Over three hundred witnesses of various kinds were interviewed; an Arab or Iranian spy ring was suggested; but in the end, seven Slovak men were tried and sentenced for raping and murdering her. Both before and after the regime change of 1989 there were rumors that the whole thing was a construct, a communist show trial of sorts. Starting in 1990 an extended juridical process re-tried and re-convicted the men. Some still suspect their innocence, but some who once suspected their innocence have since changed their minds again and believe in their guilt. (See a Reddit in English on the topic, and the Slovak Wikipedia article about the case.)
In the West we are rapidly becoming adepts of navigating in a news system where we never quite know what is true and what is fake, but our comrades to the East have been coping with the blurriness of fact and fiction for a long, long time.
So what to make of the true fact of a crime surrounded by an un-entangle-able web of fact and fiction embedded in what appears to be a work of fiction? Ľudmila Cervanová is the missing fiancée in this “novel.” Most of the text is a pair of notebooks attributed to an unnamed Colleague of a doctor (yes, a doctor like “Richard” is a doctor). But by the end you wonder if the Colleague is also a construct, and if the story and thus notebooks are actually the doctor’s (which doctor’s?). Someone—maybe the doctor—has inserted a Latin aphorism over or alongside every chunk of text, handily translated in a glossary the front and reproduced on the printed page as handwriting, further blurring the status of the written product in the reader’s hands. And even that text has one more frame, the doctor’s wife—just now widowed—who has found the notebooks, reads them, and comments on them, her exasperation matching the reader’s.
Now you see why I have no idea what it is I just read.
The one thing I can conclude, now that I’ve read twenty-five Slovak novels in English (far more than I expected to find when I began this project!) is the running trend of the circumstances of composition, or the translation thereof, matching or even exceeding in interest the composition itself.
And maybe this should come as no surprise. Slovak is quite a young language, and literacy in Slovak is younger still. For all kinds of reasons beyond its control, Slovakia has enjoyed little freedom of thought and movement of literature or even sheer numbers of potential authors to develop into a world-class literature. That very limitation dictates the kind of works that do see the light of day at all—and it seems that the recurring question is, to quote a famous Roman governor of Judea, what is truth?
So far, neither communism nor capitalism, imperialism nor democracy nor totalitarianism, have been much help in clearing away the cobwebs. A novel like Gaudeamus does not obfuscate with its hybridity and layering. It in fact portrays reality as plainly as it can.