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…