Balla, Big Love, trans. Julia and Peter Sherwood (London: Jantar, 2019), 124 pp.
Slovakia is clinically depressed.
Or so I must infer, judging from Balla’s novel Big Love, first published in Slovakia in 2015 and now available in English (thanks again to the tireless efforts of the Sherwoods). Consider this brief excerpt:
“He was burnt out.
“But how could he find a job, burnt out as he was?
“And what for?
“He had a full-time job with himself, he was preoccupied with getting through the basic functions necessary to live.
“He got out of bed but went on sleeping.
“He was permanently asleep or half asleep—unawakened, unawakened, unawakened—and as he kept turning this phrase over in his head he gave a sudden start and realized he had fallen asleep on the office toilet.” (p. 103)
That’s pretty much a textbook description of clinical depression; it’s also the novel’s plot, insofar as it has one at all. The “protagonist” Andrič sleepwalks through life, aimlessly and pointlessly. He is possessed by the dreary inability to believe in anything, be convinced of anything, or commit to anything, even to his own hedonistic self-interest.
As such, Andrič misses out on the good and rewarding relationship right in front of him with Laura. The problem is their metaphysical mismatch: she is pointed up, and he is pointed down. We can give Andrič credit, at least, for not dragging her down with him, a common enough strategy among the chronically failing-to-thrive. But nothing Laura can do, and for that matter nothing that Andrič can do, will change his direction. You can’t talk someone out of depression.
I wish I could talk Balla out of writing novels about depression or, to put it more precisely, novels that in themselves body forth depression. His previous work published in English, In the Name of the Father, moves through much the same depressive fog. There as here in Big Love, the transition from communism to capitalism has proven not to be a panacea after all. It’s easy (and appropriate) to blame a good deal of this on the crony capitalism and fake democracy that in fact came to dominate post-1989 (Czecho-)Slovakia. But it’s also due to the fact that success in capitalism requires something more than depressive fog and incapacitated mediocrity. So, what if people just don’t have it in them to do better?
The reason I wish Balla (a bureaucrat at his day job, as it turns out) could do better than narrate depression, though, is because he is such a perceptive illustrator of the world as he finds it. The interest in this short novel is not its plot nor in its characters, who function more like types. No, the selling point of the book is the various characters’ monologues: a jumble of bizarre conspiracy theories, distorted historical and scientific facts, and almost accidental insights into the mental and political illness infecting their society. (See particularly the ones on pp. 21–22, 39–41, 48–49, 50, 63–64, and 92–94.)
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Two monologues in particular stand out. One illuminates the internalized totalitarianism that even thirty years of more-or-less freedom has not managed to overcome but only to relocate:
“An experienced bureaucrat won’t let himself be deprived of totalitarianism so easily and carries it with him wherever he goes, never stating anything openly and with no opinions of his own, convinced that you must be scared in a very sophisticated way, whereas in the old days you could be scared openly and ‘officially’, so to speak, fear was something that was officially accepted, sanctioned and went without saying, in the previous regime it would have been odd not to be scared, as even the officials at the very top were scared and they were in the best position to know that fear was justified because scheming was rampant, especially among those at the very top and indeed directed chiefly at those at the very top—the experienced Panza knows very well to what extent you had to be scared and how important it was to let your superiors know that you actually were scared—not in so many words, but in a covert, yet unambiguous way, while at the same time he imagined—and he wasn’t the only one to imagine this in those days—that anyone might be his superior, including any passer-by in the street, you never know, he used to imagine, and treated every passer-by as his superior, just as he later begin to treat as his superior every statue ideologically and theologically linked to Jesus on the cross, because after the fall of the totalitarian regime Panza automatically embraced another totalitarianism in the form of the Catholic Church, which is hardly surprising since in most people’s minds totalitarianism is linked not only to fear but also to boundless hope and trust and the certainty that everything is, and will be, fine for evermore, totalitarian power not only metes out punishment but it also protects, and maintains the untenable, and so Panza genuflects before the chapels of the Holiest of Holy Trinities as well as the most garish, baroquely bloated sculptures and statues of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, he crosses himself by the book, doffs his cap and bows his head, there is something studiedly slavish about this, it is normal, totalitarian behavior, a cultural veneer; in other words, genuine subjugation.” (pp. 61–62)
The other example I’ll give here is, with no small irony, an indictment of Slovak literature altogether, placed on the lips of Laura’s mother, though a reader can’t help but wonder whether it expresses Balla’s own thoughts, Balla’s own despair, or the afflicting judgments of others on Balla:
“And as for Slovak writers… they all lack patience and perseverance… In fact, they lack everything a good writer should possess… but above all, they lack experience. Experience with women, apart from anything else. Mind you, I'm not talking only about male writers but also about female writers because they, too, lack experience with women, they don’t know any real women. Reality—that’s the tragedy. They don’t know women and how they behave in tragic circumstances. They don't know women as tragedies. I used to teach a class on Slovak writers in grammar school. I don’t know if anyone still does that these days. Do they? I could no longer bring myself to convince anyone that they should know something about Slovak writers. Not that we could justify such a need in the old days either, but back then we didn’t need to justify the things. Eventually I became so disgusted with Slovak writers that I switched to teaching Russian literature. I wanted to keep away from Slovak misfits. I want to keep far away from them, I really do. Fortunately, writers don’t exist anymore. Because to exist is to mean something. But they don’t mean anything. We should erase them from our diaries, we should stop phoning them on their name day. They are nobodies. Yet these nobodies haven’t even noticed. After November 1989, the Slovak peasants noticed immediately from that moment on they were nobodies. But the writers didn’t notice anything… You realize that there’s something wrong with books, that it’s unnatural to cram one’s flat and life full of books. Go ahead, help yourself to as many of these fat tomes as you like! Including those with dedications by Slovak writers. We used to think their signatures would be worth something one day. It never happened.” (pp. 79–80)
It’s an odd thing: under the old system, attempting to speak the truth could get you imprisoned or killed, but that itself told you how worthwhile the effort was. Now you are just another thinly piping voice in a vast marketplace; your chances of competing successfully enough even to be noticed, much less be paid, is virtually nil; and nobody cares about your work enough to vilify you—only to ignore you. Let’s admit the depression is not without cause.
Still, despite the fog, the whistle in the dark that this novel represents seems to want better. Even a half-hearted critique is light years away from total capitulation. Once again on the lips of Laura’s mother we hear the devastating observation that people in Slovakia want only “torpor and hibernation” (79). Isn’t the very act of saying so an attempt to rouse them to something better?