“In the Name of the Father” is the titular novella in a collection that also includes three short stories by the mononymous Balla. All four works in the volume serve as further volleys in the effort by contemporary Slovak writers to destroy the romantic image of their home country: demonstrating that the land of pious beekeepers and goatherds, historically innocent victims of wicked imperial forces, is a lie.
This far into reading novels from Slovakia, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of its contemporary fiction is political in nature, even if its subject matter is not explicitly political. Actually, the ostensible story is rarely political at all. But this is not surprising. The mandate of communism was to turn everything political. Nothing could be private, personal, individual, religious, familial, or economic without simultaneously being political. However much post-communist Slovaks might be exhausted by this hostile takeover of all of life by politics, there are very few conceptual alternatives on the horizon…
Eat Your Veg, Change Your Life
Vegetables are sexy now and getting hotter by the minute. Between the moralism of the anti-meat crowd, anxiety over the planet, and finally something like a decent farmer’s market trade flourishing in the U.S., people raised on frozen limas and canned green beans are actually excited about botanical foodstuffs again. And that’s to say nothing of the kale phenomenon.
Accordingly, publishers meet the demand by cranking out one gorgeously photographed cookbook after another, with increasingly weird fusion combos and an ever-receding horizon of Amish-sourced heirloom varietals to keep the revenue churning.
But they’re all latecomers to the game. The best veg cookbook ever was published almost twenty years ago already. Allow me to reintroduce you to Jack Bishop’s Vegetables Every Day…
Read moreSlovak Novel(la)s in English #22: Ever Green Is…
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…
Read moreLutheran Saints #8: Hallgrímur Pétursson
No human beings even tried to live in Iceland before the ninth century A.D. It is harsh, cold, rocky, and rough. Little grows beyond lichen. Sheep and horses can make do grazing, but agriculture is out of the question. Fish are abundant in the surrounding waters, but violent storms and long winter ice make it a dangerous living. Those who finally did stake out a life for themselves on this spartan rock at the north edge of the world were tough realists with no small streak of fatalism.
But extremity conveys its own benefits. In such a place, everyone has to pull together to survive. Loyalties are intense, honor is everything, and even chieftains have to respect the will of the people. Storytelling is what gets you through: it’s no wonder that Icelanders produced the oldest literature of northern Europe in their rich collection of sagas. Or that they as a people were so deeply shaped by the Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–1674).
Just a little over a century after the first settlements in Iceland—in the year 1000—the Althing, Iceland’s council of elders, undertook a momentous decision on behalf of its people: to accept the Christian faith. Despite its coming from a hot, dry desert worlds away, the gospel gripped the people and indigenized quickly. Ísleifur, the first native bishop, was canonized in 1056 and immediately saw to the education of his clergy and translation projects.
Half a millennium later, a student named Oddur Gottskálksson learned of Luther’s teachings while studying abroad, prayed to the Lord to show him the right way, and upon receiving his answer pursued the Reformation course. He undertook the first translation of the New Testament into Icelandic, printed in 1540, which in turn led to the first complete Icelandic Bible in 1584. These two sparked a fresh flowering of literature after several centuries of dormancy following the era of the sagas. The Reformation’s commitment to education coincided neatly with Icelandic values and led to widespread literacy, and the new permission for pastors to marry meant that the clergy, now having families of their own, shared personally in the people’s struggle against poverty and for survival.
Nevertheless, the Lutheran interpretation of the gospel didn’t really take hold in the lives of the Icelandic people until the seventeenth century under the guidance of Hallgrímur…
Read moreSlovak Novels in English #21: Dragon Castle
Like The Ugly and Out of This Furnace, Dragon Castle counts as a Slovak novel in English only by a certain sleight of hand on my part. It’s not a translation of a book originally written in Slovak, but it’s the only case I’ve ever found of an English-language fantasy novel explicitly drawing on elements of Slovak folklore and language. Reason enough to honor it here!
That it came from Joseph Bruchac is all the more surprising. This well-known YA author has made his name with a grand catalogue of titles drawing on his Native American heritage, specifically from the Abenaki people. His novel Code Talker tells about the Navajos whose evidently impenetrable language played a major role in World War II espionage. He’s recounted the stories of Squanto, Sacajawea, and Pocahantas as well as animal and mythological folktales, not to mention contemporary stories about young people from Native backgrounds and even a dystopian novel.
It turns out, though, that Bruchac has a Slovak ethnic lineage in addition to his Abenaki one…
Read moreLutheran Saints #7: Dag Hammarskjöld
An exceedingly rare case of a saint of both the lefthand and righthand kingdoms: civic wonderworker and mystic alike. Proposed date of commemoration: September 18.
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“For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”
With these words Dag Hammarskjöld greeted the new year of 1953 in the private journal that later became known to the world as Markings. They are not the words one would have expected from him at this point in his life. The years had been painful. He was lonely, deeply lonely. His thoughts recurred to duty and not infrequently to sacrifice. He wondered if life held any meeting at all. Suicide was a temptation all the way until 1952 when, it seems, he made the final decision against it: “No! Death must be your final gift to life, not an act of treachery against it.”
Those words were prophetic. His death would be a gift to life, but taken by another’s treachery, not his own…
Read moreSinging the Praises of a Story Grid Edit(or)
I’ve enthused before about Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. Once I’d read the book a few times, in addition to bingeing my way through every single episode of The Story Grid and The Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcasts, I was emboldened to take the tools and apply them to my memoir. I knew I more or less had the story arc in place, but I also knew from reader comments that there were some gaps that fuddled or distracted. It’s always amazing what you don’t realize has to be said because it’s so obvious to yourself!
Armed with Story Grid tools and reader comments, I did a close analysis of the entire book—and saw what was missing.
In short, while all the pieces of the external genre were in place (in Story Grid lingo, Love/courtship), a few key scenes were missing from the internal genre (Worldview/maturation). And this was a serious problem, because while the love story is the hilarious-and-heartbreaking narrative that should drive readers on chapter by chapter, the real meat of the story, and its final payoff, is in the maturation of worldview. Less obviously dramatic, but ultimately more meaningful.
Once I saw that, I also saw exactly what to do—where I’d missed an opportunity or failed to realize the stakes of an event. Corrected and embellished, I now had a plot with two strong and interrelated plot tracks to take the reader all the way to the end. I even charted the revised version one more time to make sure every last scene was carrying its weight.
And then I was done, right?
Not quite…
Read moreSlovak Novels in English #20: The Democrats
This novel is another in the series produced by Artia, a Communist-era publishing house based out of Prague. Artia overwhelmingly favoring Czech authors, Jesenský’s book is one of only three (so far as I can tell) by Slovak authors that got translated into English. Therein lies a tale of its own.
What, exactly, was the motivation for a state-run publisher to produce English-language versions of its national literature? It takes little imagination to see the propaganda angle at work. For example, Rudolf Jašík’s St. Elizabeth’s Square recounts the horrors of growing anti-Semitism in pre-war Slovakia leading to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, a very popular point of contrast for true-believer communists like the author—and one conveniently ignoring the totalitarian and anti-Semitic policies at work in the so-called workers’ paradise. But Jašík fit the bill so nicely that two of his novels were seen fit for wider a readership (a review of his Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing will be forthcoming) and hence comprise two-thirds of Artia’s modest Slovak translation program.
The prolific Janko Jesenský, author of The Democrats, didn’t quite have Jašík’s bonafides, but at least he had the good sense to die in 1945 after having openly expressed his opposition to fascism…
Read moreLutheran Saints #6: Lajos Ordass
On that day in March 1948 there was another Hungarian with Lajos Ordass (1901–1978) on the plane to Zürich, a senior of the Methodist church. Visibly upset, he asked Lajos for a private meeting once they’d landed. Upon their safe arrival in Switzerland, the man told his story: how he’d been arrested in Budapest, interrogated about his overseas contacts—and asked what he knew about Lajos. He’d only been allowed to leave the country on the condition that he spy on Lajos during the trip, but in defiance of government pressure he turned over to Lajos the list of questions he’d been instructed to ask. He only dared to tell Lajos these things at all because he was planning to escape, never to return to Hungary.
Despite the warning Lajos returned home, bracing himself for the onslaught…
Read moreLutheran Saints #5: Anna Sarah Kugler
“With only one life to live, why throw it away by going to India?” a friend once asked Anna Sarah Kugler (1856–1930). Deliberately adopting a turn of phrase from her new country, the doctor replied, “It was written on her forehead by the pen of Brahma,” which is to say: she was called to it by God and dared not disobey.
In the late nineteenth-century America, it was uncommon for women to be doctors, much less missionary doctors forsaking their homeland to serve on the other side of the world. But Anna had known that was what she would do ever since as a little girl she first heard a missionary to India speak about the work there…
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