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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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Last But Not Least, Slovak Novel(la)s in English #42: That Alluring Land

June 14, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In all fairness, this should have been “Slovak Novels in English #1” (that honor went somewhat haphazardly to The Year of the Frog instead), because it is the very first work of Slovak literature in English that I ever read.

The year was 1998, and the discovery was online used booksellers. Those who came of age after the internet revolution and yet are bibliophiles cannot even fathom the limitations on voracious readers then. We had what bookstores physically carried—and even if a well-curated collection beyond the boilerplate bestsellers, there’s just only so much a Waldenbooks in the mall could stock, much less make a profit on selling. Libraries had more range, but inevitable limitations as well. I remember having heard of books that I knew I’d never find, or seeing “Also by this author” in beloved books and knowing it was a lost cause. Even used bookstores tended to focus on mass market paperbacks in high-volume genres like mystery or romance.

So really, you just can’t fathom what wonder opened up when you could type in a title and author—find the book—and buy it…

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Tags Slovak novels in English, Slovakia, novels
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Slovak Novels in English #41: The Bride

May 3, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is my second review of a work by Grosman, and one of a by-now not-insignificant number of Slovak novels not actually composed in Slovak.

Grosman was Slovak, and that was his primary language; moreover, as in The Shop on Main Street, the novel (or really novella—at 113 pp. and print the size of a YA novel from the 70s, I’d bet it’s not much over 20,000 words in length) is set in eastern Slovakia. Grosman’s adult career as a writer and film producer took place in Prague, however, where Czech was naturally the language of choice.

However, Grosman was not in residence in Prague when this novel was first published in the original language. The year of publication was 1969, but the year before was the Prague Spring, followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion…

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Tags Slovak novels in English, Slovakia, novels
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Slovak Novels in English #40: A Slovak's Flight to Wonderland

February 8, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Joseph Pauco, A Slovak’s Flight to Wonderland, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union, [1963] 1979), 240 pp.

First things first: I’m not actually sure whether this is a novel. I think it is. But it’s hard to tell.

It might just be half and half. The first half of the book relates, mostly in the third person, the fate of a handful of Slovaks in the immediate aftermath of World War II, fleeing Slovakia for fear of the “liberating” Soviet troops advancing from the east, into the only negligibly friendlier arms of Austrians in the west. The Slovaks spend time in camps and eventually get designated refugees by kindly American forces.

Told like a novel, these parts have a lot of specific detail that sound like they were experienced firsthand. Plus the occasional, unexplained use of “we” on the part of the narrator.

Click on the cover to order your copy of my memoir!

But then, once everyone arrives in America, the book shifts into what is best described as short essay format. And the essays seem to come from the author himself, though that’s never exactly clarified. Conversations are documented in great detail, mostly debating communism. The most interesting part of the book are the outsider’s view of American quirks, like voter habits, Cadillacs, “Negroes” (depicted positively, with the happy assertion that the race problem is all but solved in the U.S.), banquets, shorts, and even chewing gum.

If not exactly well conceived, the book would appear from this description to be innocuous. The problem is far more in what’s not said than in what is said. The criticisms of communism are fine, and entirely deserved, in my judgment. What’s lacking is equal attention paid to criticizing fascism.

Alas, as I already know from a previous Paučo effort, he and his ilk were fawning devotees of Tiso, the Catholic priest who governed the Nazi puppet state of independent Slovakia. Even putting the best construction on it—justified fear of communism, two decades of frustration at patronizing mistreatment by Czechs and thus gratitude for Slovak “independence,” and perhaps genuine ignorance of Tiso’s complicity in deporting Jews—it’s just impossible to justify the oversight.

This book was first published in 1963, after all. Paučo had nearly two decades to reckon with his nation and his Catholicism’s collaboration with fascism. Indeed, it remains something of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more open Catholic reckoning with its complicity in fascist regimes throughout Europe, to say nothing of in Latin America.

And I say this as someone with zero sympathy to communism. But the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Lutherans in Slovakia learned this the hard way, too, by assuming anti-fascist-Catholic communists were therefore their allies. They sure as hell weren’t.

I appreciated Paučo’s enthusiasm for America. He has the classic immigrant’s admiration for what really does make the United States a grand and admirable experiment. But I can’t fathom how that learning in a democratic society failed to shed light on his Tisoist sympathies.

Tags Slovak novels in English, Slovakia, novels
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Slovak Novels in English #39: Dead Soldiers Don't Sing

November 23, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

There was no question but that I had to track down this novel, one of only three from the Slovak published by Artia in the early 1960s in English to prove that good-quality literature can come from Communist nations, too. However, as only six libraries worldwide appear to have it (four of them in Denmark—uh, what’s that all about?) and I have never even once seen it for sale on any used book site, I was getting desperate.

Which explains why I finally forked over an astronomical sum to get a scan from the U.S. Library of Congress. I won’t say exactly so much; only that it made the $60 I threw away on The Heiress look like a deal by comparison.

Unfortunately, compulsion of this nature rarely pays off, and so it is in this case…

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Slovak Novels in English #38: The Heiress

September 14, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In many ways, this review marks a triumph: the completion of my quest to locate and read all of Kristína Royová’s books in English! (See the now-complete bibliography at the end of this post.) The title is not literal—in Slovak the book is called Moc svetla, “The Power of the Light,” with an epigraph from John 1:5. A whole seventy years passed between in its initial publication in Slovak and its translation into English.

It was no small thing to add this last Royová novel to my collection. The only used copies I could locate online originally cost upwards of $200! I wrote a few pleading emails to the vendors to broker a deal. None of them ever responded, but not long after, one dropped the price to $60. Still a bit much for a faded mass market paperback, but I wasn’t going to let the chance slip away. Collectors are always at the mercy of dealers!

I wish I could say that this almost 600-page book was worth the 10¢ per page. Unfortunately, I have to admit that the 3-star rating for The Heiress is awarded on the same arbitrary grounds that I gave the same rating to Bellevue: a split between a 5 for the book achieving its intended purpose and a 1 for the enjoyment I took in reading it.

It’s pretty funny, actually, that I would have the same issue with these two particular Slovak novels in English, because they are about as diametrically opposed in outlook as humanly possible. Bellevue is bleak and nihilistic; The Heiress is chirpy and optimistic. In truth, the best characterization I can think of for The Heiress is “religious soap opera”…

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Tags Slovakia, Slovak novels in English, novels, Kristina Royova
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Slovak Novels in English #37: The Shop on Main Street

August 3, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Once again I’ve chosen a novel that pushes the boundaries of my mandate to read all “Slovak Novels in English.” In this case, the issue is equivocation on the term “Slovak.” The fact is, The Shop on Main Street was not written in the Slovak language at all… but in Czech, which is why it’s been issued in a series called Modern Czech Classics. Whether and to what extent Czech and Slovak are different languages has been a neuralgic issue for a long time, and even more so in the days when the two peoples shared a country. In any case, they are mutually intelligible to a degree that native English speakers can’t even imagine. However, I will not therefore conclude that I need to cover all Czech novels in English, too!

The more specific reason in favor of counting this one a “Slovak Novel in English” is the fact that the author was, in fact, a Slovak. Ladislav Grosman moved to Prague and adopted the local lingo to such an extent that it made sense to write first a short story, then a hybrid novel-screenplay, in Czech. Still, the story is set in Slovakia and all the characters are Slovak. So the novel passes my own personal litmus test…

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Slovak Novels in English #36: The Hot Summer of 1968

June 22, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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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! …

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Tags novels, Slovakia, Slovak novels in English
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Slovak Novels in English #35: Bellevue

June 8, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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Ivana Dobrakovová, Bellevue, trans. Julia and Peter Sherwood (London: Jantar, 2019), 220 pp.

Of all the Slovak novels in English I’ve reviewed so far, the assignment of three stars to this one is the most arbitrary of any rating I’ve given. It’s a compromise, actually. If I were to rate the novel based on its accomplishment of its intended goal, it certainly deserves five stars. If I were to rate it on the pleasure I took in reading it, it would get one star.

But that can hardly count as a legitimate a criticism of a book that maps out the degeneration of a mind into madness…

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Slovak Novels in English #34: Martinko

March 2, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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This is the fifth novel by Royová that I’m reviewing, following upon Sunshine Country, Three Comrades, Only a Servant, and Kept by a Mighty Hand. But, as it turns out, Martinko is the very first book she wrote!

It was published originally in 1893 until the title Bez Boha na svete, or “Without God in the World,” though the protagonist does bear the name Martinko. Royová wrote it in response to a general challenge for someone to produce some kind of children’s literature “for God.” It now stands as the single most translated work of Slovak literature—the introduction to my copy notes that it has appeared in innumerable German editions as well as Hungarian and Russian.

So that’s pretty cool. However, Royová went on to write nearly seventy novels, and frankly it’s pretty obvious that this one is her first. I’ve spoken warmly of the emotional and spiritual complexity in some of her other works, but this one is so pious as to border on the saccharine. A poor little orphan boy, kept alive but not well-loved by the townspeople, yearns for God, finds a Bible and some mentors, inadvertently re-enacts certain aspects of Jesus’ ministry, and dies tragically from injuries gained while saving a lost sheep, young but saved and an inspiration to the half-hearted Christians all around him. The christological allusions are heavy-handed, at best.

But as so often is the case with Slovak lit translated before the Velvet Revolution, the circumstances of its translation proved to be the really interesting facet of this story…

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Tags Slovakia, Slovak novels in English, novels, Kristina Royova
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Slovak Novels in English #33: It Happened on the First of September

January 19, 2021 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
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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…

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