Viliam Klimáček, The Hot Summer of 1968, trans. Peter Petro (Simsbury, CT and Tacoma Park, MD: Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press, 2021), 312 pp.
I little expected to find another five-star novel so soon after It Happened on the First of September. But not only does The Hot Summer of 1968 fully deserve this highest of ratings, it’s practically a sequel to the other novel, despite being by another author. I take this as evidence that the oft-overlooked Slovakia has a history and culture rich enough to repay ample fictional exploration. The more, the better!
While Rankov’s It Happened spans the three decades from 1938 to 1968, Klimáček’s book starts in—unsurprisingly—the summer of ‘68, though, contrary to what you might expect from the title, it doesn’t stay there. The action extends out several years into the early 1970s, exploring the early aftereffects of the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact troops from the perspective of ordinary people. (The author notes that the government leaders who inflicted this on the people don’t deserve to be mentioned, so he won’t—but he does slip up later on and name Husák, the opportunist who snatched the presidency in exchange for being Moscow’s lapdog.) In this respect, the novel isn’t as laser-focused as Mňačko’s The Seventh Night, but it does show us the rippling results of that one devastating week.
While a number of novels I’ve reviewed so far are set in the normalization period of 1968 to 1989, when the Communist Party attempted to return Czechoslovakia to its “normal” state before the reforms of the late sixties, only The Year of the Frog explores as deeply the existential malaise that set in during this time. Perhaps not by coincidence, Peter Petro translated that one, too.
What makes Hot Summer utterly unlike any other Slovak novel in English I’ve read so far, though, is that its account of Slovaks struggling under reascendent totalitarian power is paired with the experience of migrants and refugees who got out while they still could. Thus we follow Tereza to Israel and London, Jozef and his family first to the U.S. and later to Canada, and Alexander and Petra right to Canada, where all the immigrating characters eventually converge.
The story has an especial poignancy in conveying the mutual misunderstanding among Slovaks in all different kinds of situations: sellout Lajo in Slovakia can’t fathom the wealth and opportunity of the West, Slovak immigrants from before the 1948 coup can’t fathom what’s happened to their homeland nor can those fleeing communism fathom the peasant language preserved in time of their elders in the New World, and the long-term residents of the West can’t fathom at all how Slovaks in the ČSSR justify cooperation with their oppressors. The novel brilliantly allows us to sympathize with all sides—and to recognize just what a challenge mutual understanding is, even when it seems like it should be natural and easy.
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I also admit a highly personal reason for enjoying this book so much: one of the main characters is a Slovak Lutheran pastor! Given how rarely Lutheran pastors appear in English-language literature at all, this felt like a double portion of the Spirit. I could hardly believe my eyes when the Slovak Zion Synod made a brief appearance. (Full disclosure: I myself am a pastor of this Synod!) Alas, the fictional bishop of the Synod grows suspicious of Jozef upon learning that he’d refused ordination back home, though it was so that he wouldn’t have to become an informer for State Security. Fearing that a spy may be infiltrating the American church, the bishop rescinds his offer to install Jozef in a Slovak-speaking parish. But, happily, Jozef finds his home in the Missouri Synod (presumably the SELC) and serves first in Chicago, later in Toronto. He and his wife become exemplary agents of the gospel and serve ongoing waves of immigrants. And—as we find out in the Acknowledgements—Jozef has a real-life basis, Pastor Dušan Toth, who actually asked Klimáček to write the play that would become this novel in the first place!
In fact, that’s the other distinctive quality of this novel: as we say nowadays, it’s very meta. The author regularly inserts his comments into the narrative, qua author and not qua narrator, forecasting the future or adding a side note about his own experiences and memories. The Acknowledgements reveal that, while this is truly a novel that follows its own unfolding logic, it’s anchored in reality: Klimáček collected firsthand from a variety of immigrants tales of their experiences, then dismantled and reassembled them into the story that we’ve read. The result is a series of interrelated tales and scenes in a subtle but rewarding narrative arc that real life rarely possesses, strewn throughout with details that give it the tang of real life.
Needless to say, I got a lot of enjoyment out of the novel because I knew the basics of the history, and my own history brushes along it tangentially. But it’s a good read even without this background knowledge, and the issues that the characters face are no less real now than they were then.
One tiny quibble: it’s Slovak and Czechoslovak, not (God help us all) “Slovakian” or “Czechoslovakian.” Occasionally the book uses the correct former terms; I’m not sure why it’s inconsistent. But I guess if The New York Times insists on using the wrong terms, it’s no surprise that others still do, too.
This cover for the Slovak edition has to be one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Mandel Vilar for giving the English edition a much more effective and evocative cover.