Pavol Rankov, It Happened on the First of September (Or Some Other Time), trans. Magdalena Mullek (Bloomington: Three String Books, 2020), 265 pp.
After a very, very, very long wait, I have finally read another Slovak Novel in English worthy of the full five stars.* Gratulujem Pavol Rankov and also translator Magdalena Mullek for a job well done!
The literary conceit that gives the novel its structure as well as its title is that all the key action takes place, year after year, on the first of September. The story begins with a chapter entitled “Episode 1938” with the events of September 1, 1938, and continues year by year through 1968. It’s a brilliant device, letting the reader know in advance the time span in which it will take place, because it makes time itself a vivid character in the unfolding action.
It’s all the more powerful of a device if you know the basic outline of central European history in this period. You know that doom is soon to fall sheerly because of the story starting in the fall of 1938, and that on the first of September the very next year the Nazis will invade Poland and set the Second World War in motion. You know that a decade into the story, there will be a successful communist coup that will control events for the last two decades of the novel. I looked forward to Stalin’s death in 1953 and the attempted revolution in Budapest in 1956. And of course I knew that the story’s end in 1968 had to be connected to the Prague Spring and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August of that year—though not where the characters would end up by then, or why. The narrative tension was outstanding.
While knowledge of history certainly enhanced the reading, you don’t need to come to the novel with such a background to enjoy it. Rankov deftly fills in the necessary details to guide the reader along, without being heavy-handed or sounding like a textbook. The true heart of the story is the intertwining lives of four characters: Ján, Peter, Gabriel, and Mária.
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At least, that’s their names in Slovak. But all of them have variants on their names throughout the story, which itself tells you a lot about the region and the period. Ján is Czech, Peter is Hungarian, and Gabriel is Jewish—yet all of them are Slovaks, and that is very much the point. The three boys and their common love interest Mária grow up in Levice, a town in the southern part of present-day Slovakia whose identity and borders have fluctuated over the centuries. In truth, you can’t sharply separate Slovak and Hungarian history, a fact that makes both parties uneasy in their own way. Fixed borders serve a stabilizing purpose on the state level, but on the human level they are far more fictitious than a novel. Through an account of friendship, Rankov quietly deconstructs nationalistic narratives of citizenship and belonging.
As for the plot, it begins at a swimming pool (hence the cover image) as the three boys compete in a swimming race for who gets dibs on pursuing Mária. The first race is inconclusive, and over the next thirty years they will take turns getting the upper hand of the others, only for a reversal of some kind to shift the order once again. In the meanwhile, each of the boys grown to manhood has to sort out his relationship to Slovakia, to his own ethnic, linguistic, and religious background, and ultimately to the new communist state. Rankov depicts as beautifully as Ladislav Mňačko the insidious process by which the Czechoslovak communist party and government sucked people in and deprived them of both individuality and freedom—with the consent of the deprived. The three men vary in their level of collaboration, but it is impossible to stay in Czechoslovakia and keep their hands clean.
What makes his depiction all the more effective is the genuine sympathy Rankov evokes for his compromised characters. It’s impossible to stand outside and insist you’d do better. The headnote to the novel is telling: “All of the characters in the novel It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time) are fictitious. First they lived in the times and places as described in the novel, and then the author invented them. Everything is invented. Nothing ever was, no one ever lived. There never has been a first of September.” How do you tell the truth about a situation that demanded untruths of everyone—even of the true believers?
Rich in detail, subtle in execution, compelling and page-turning despite the small human scale of the action, It Happened on the First of September is a great read. Let’s have more of this kind of Slovak novel translated into English!
*The four other novels I’ve awarded five stars are: Rivers of Babylon, Three Chestnut Horses, The Ugly, and The Taste of Power.