This should have been a great work.

It certainly is grand in its ambition: a retelling of Slovakia’s history from the rise of fascism in the 1930s up to the present, almost a century in all, from the perspective of one family. Big, epic historical fiction renders the distant past rivetingly present and aims to overturn the convenient and cheap moral judgments we place on our ancestors by illustrating the agonies of their decisions without the benefit of our hindsight.

Krištúfek was clearly going for this kind of effect…

If Judy Blume had been Slovak, this would be the result.

At first blush, it’s a pretty straightforward young adult novel. Told in the first person, the story is the stream-of-consciousness narration of fourteen-year-old Olga, who lives in Bratislava with her parents and Granny. She endures all the straightforward troubles of early adolescence: the romance that is desired but withheld or lost set in contrast with the repulsive advances of the undesirable; parents who don’t understand and yet are desperately loved and needed all the same; friends who are sometimes devoted and sometimes unreliable; school stresses; emotional highs and lows that pass through the soul unannounced like a gale-force wind...

This is a “Slovak novel in English” in a rather different sense from the ones I’ve discussed so far. The author is a Slovak national, and the hero is a Slovak—though of an imaginary tribe of Siberian Slovaks who got tired of capturing that vast snowscape at the end of World War I, got off the trans-Siberian railroad, and stayed put in an idyllic valley called Verkhoyansk—though, according to Business Insider, the real valley of Verkhoyansk is “the most miserable place in the world,” which makes it for sure a genuine choice of oppressed peasantry...

Ladislav Mňačko did not start out as a critic of communism. Quite the contrary, he was supportive of the regime change in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and looked forward to all the ways Marxism would transform human society and personality for the better, working as a journalist to document the change from the old ways of greed, theft, and exploitation to the new era of solidarity and sharing. Except… things didn’t turn out that way...