Balaban Maybe We're Leaving

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-911414-71-1
Verlag: Glagoslav Publications Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 164 Seiten

A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and 'puts aside the things of childhood,' it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves.

A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then - as she falls asleep in the car - takes the long way home, to prolong a moment such as he has not experienced in years.

An elderly doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, makes use of the few precious moments of consciousness granted him each morning to pass on to his grandson what he has learned about life and living responsibly. Loss, and permanence, the ephemeral and the eternal, are common themes of Jan Balabán's collection of short stories , presented here in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski.

With psychological insight that rivals the great novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the twenty-one linked narratives that make up the collection present us with everyday people, with everyday problems - and teach us to love and respect the former, and bear the latter.

Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balaban, Jan

Leseproben

Who is the third that walks always beside you?

The Everyday Apocalypse in Jan Balabán’s Maybe We’re Leaving.

The road narrowed to a pathway leading into the midst of the riverside forest. Huge trees: lindens, alders, maples, oaks and innumerable hornbeams enclosed them in a balmy twilight. The path twisted and turned in the thick undergrowth of bear garlic, the white flowers of which twinkled like sparks.

It is a striking synaesthesia — one can almost hear and smell that bear garlic, as well as see it. It is an expression not unlike what we find in the verse of Marianne Moore, whom Eliot greatly appreciated (and who also had a penchant for the building up of crescendos of images).

But again, it is the message of imminent responsibility that most links Balabán with Eliot. Stylistically, besides the obvious generic differences, he is closer in literary approach to the great realists and psychological novelists of the European nineteenth century, chief among whom is Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Hruška notes this as well, referring to “his extraordinary degree of seriousness, degree of gravity found in his words. It reminds one of that evangelical vigour in which narratives of time past are written, in the age of the Russian realist novels.” p. 514.) The quote here to offer is the fevered reflection of Oldrich from “And the Birds as Well,” (The title, “A ptáci taky,” is borrowed from the text of a song by The Plastic People of the Universe (author’s note).) who tries to shield his mind from the terrors of his ornithophobia by an abstract consideration of the child in his wife’s womb, the gender of whom they do not yet know:

And so thus must you address twice over one incomprehensible child. They are two approaches to one summit, to the abstract child, of whom all concrete newborns are just imperfect variants, just like all people are merely unsuccessful derivatives of man, of the son of man, the pattern elevated above the poverty of all concrete names, above all vain human destinies.

This is an odd, yet torturously logical, meditation (which began with a philological consideration of the morphology of the names Andrea/Ondrej) that would not be out of place in the mouth of one of the great Russian’s hyper-intellectual heroes, like Ivan Karamazov, during his disquisition on the Grand Inquisitor. Yet Balabán is nowhere near as drastic as Dostoevsky. Violence, up to and including brutal murders, occurs in all three of the novels referenced in the pages of this book, but the Czech author does not need to resort to overwhelming shock tactics to discuss the pathologies of everyday life. (Physical violence in the context of marriages breaking down, or, rather, its allure and repulsiveness to the characters concerned, can be found in stories such as “Uršula” and “Edita.” But that is about as far as it goes.) For these are quotidian situations we are presented with in Maybe We’re Leaving. They range from the nervy half-bitten anxieties of a couple in a second marriage, played out in front of a foundling dog (“His Master’s Voice”) to the heartrendingly tragic, yet no less common, situation of a child suffering from an incurable illness (“The Burning Child”), but they are all of them stories to which we can all relate. They are so common in their conception that each reader, I reckon, has heard of something similar happening in the “real life” that surrounds her or him, and even possibly — though one hopes it is not so — has experienced it on his own skin.

The limpid descriptions of these everyday situations create a sense of reality that drives deeper than what we find in the great novels of nineteenth century Realism. Objects so common that they are within our reach at this moment, as we hold this book in our hands, and people so common as to be our neighbours, coupled with Balabán’s poetic mixing of narrators from third-person omniscient to stream-of-consciousness first person, (The latter is indicated in our translation by italics.) foster in us a sense of lived immediacy which forbids us to hold the situations at arm’s length. We can almost taste the stories. As Hruška so accurately describes it in the above note, Balabán progresses from minute detail to generalisation, and thus effects a very human expansion of the experience from what happened to this particular individual, to something that touches upon us all, as humans.

The intimacy of the narrative is also helped on by the interwoven structure of Balabán’s collection. Many, but not all, of the stories are linked. They do not run into one another consecutively, as they might in a traditional frame narrative; they are linked, rather, by the author’s use of the same characters in different stories. Dr. Roman Hradílek is little more than an introductory prop for the story of his wife in “Uršula,” while he is front and centre in “Salami Horses,” and appears as a much more sympathetic character than we would have expected, based on the first tale. Likewise, his wife is only tangentially mentioned in his story — providing another look at the character of that protagonist, with whom we sympathised in “Uršula,” and their son Robert, barely mentioned in the earlier work, is fleshed out and made real in the latter. The despairing drunk of “Emil” makes a phantom appearance in “Bottoms Up,” while the dysfunctional Cervenka clan to whom we are introduced at second-hand in “The Cedar and the Hammer” make a guest appearance, drunk at the counter of the liquor store, near the conclusion of “Emil.” The positive young lovers Gabriela and Timi thread through both “Gabriela” and “Ray Bradbury.” The effect we experience when coming across these familiar characters at unsuspected moments is not unlike that achieved by Krzysztof Kieslowski in his own interplaiting cinematic series Dekalog.

Since all of his stories take place in Ostrava and its general environs, Balabán heightens the reality of his narratives by immersing the reader in a situation that approximates life in a common area. We become the neighbours of these people, and they bob and weave into and out of our purview just as do the familiar faces of our apartment block, our workplace, our parks and the hospitals we visit. Unlike the writer he surely admired, Balabán does not introduce any feverish Raskolnikov into his stories, who butchers a defenceless old woman in order to test out a philosophical thesis. The anguish of a single mother about to introduce her child to an apartment in a housing estate that, with its defensively barred windows, seems more like a prison cell than a real home (“Magda”), is enough to arouse our sympathies and engage our minds on questions concerning the world about us, and the social conditions in which some of us are forced to live. By focusing our eyes on the everyday concerns and mundane trials of common, ordinary individuals — whose stories we are sometimes led to consider from more than one angle, as in the case of Roman and Uršula — Balabán slyly engages our sympathy on behalf of quite unremarkable people. And in so doing, he displays a great, deep, Christian humanism, which leads us to acknowledge the worth and dignity of every single human being.

Jan Balabán (1961—2010) was only eight years old when Aleksander Dubcek sought to introduce “Socialism with a human face,” a less repressive, open rule in the then-Communist controlled Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. He was still eight years old when the Soviet Union, the Communist hegemon of Eastern Europe, led the armies of five “fraternal” Communist nations into Czechoslovakia, in order to repress the Prague Spring and reintroduce totalitarian order. It is worth considering whether this wrenching event — the excitement of a Western nation beginning to breathe with both lungs again, suddenly stifled under the Soviet boot — had a seminal influence on the young boy’s developing consciousness. Certainly, the characters in all of the short stories that make up Maybe We’re Leaving seem to be in search of something that was taken away from them, to return to a better world that existed just around the corner they turned a moment before. Whether it be Edita’s husband, heading for a messy divorce, yet desperately nostalgic for the happy times of their marriage, little, terminally-ill Katka longing for that time before she learned how to count, which conflates in her mind with the time before she grew sick, or the nerdy Jaromír, sighing after the pristine Pre-Cambrian era, unspoilt as yet by the hand of man, each and every actor on the stage of Balabán’s collection is in search of a return path to a paradise lost. “She didn’t understand what she was supposed to understand,” the narrator of “The Burning Child” tells us, in reference to Katka, sick in hospital, and preternaturally talented with a mathematical sharpness that holds her in an obsessive grip, she merely nodded so that she could get up from her crouch at last and continue on the path between the pines leading to the ruins on that hot summer day, which she still remembered chiefly as back then, when she still didn’t know how to count. Somewhere in the back of her head she still preserved the image of her incomprehension, when she saw those lines or...