The World According to Škvorecký

Years before writers like M. G. Vassanji and Nalo Hopkinson began vividly imagining Canada’s immigrant-remade urban landscapes, Škvorecký was depicting such landscapes with far more than the immigrant writer’s eye for the comedy and tragedy of the here-and-there. Indeed, the grandness of mind and heart that runs through The Engineer ensures that even melancholic immigrant remembrances are charged with immediate relevance. Near the end of the novel, Danny contemplates the life of his old foreman from the Nazi aircraft factory where he worked during the war. The foreman had since been imprisoned by the Communists and was facing death: “Was he terrified too? Certainly he was; everyone is.” In Paul Wilson’s searing translation, the one-word shift from past to present, from “was” to “is,” raises the perception of politically charged mortality into the general fear of death itself. As happens so many times in the novel, the passage reaches from the realm of tragic politics to the very highest and most universal order of human concerns.

In a preface to the comparatively small-scale Ordinary Lives, Škvorecký describes his characters as high school classmates “torn apart and the lives of its members uprooted by some questionable social engineering, first by the Nazi race laws...and then, after the Communist putsch in 1948, by the...brutal ‘class struggle’ that raged on, in various forms, until the late 1980s.” Those who survive reunite after 1989, having “found their lives once more flowing into the common stream of everything that lives.” The wistful language, here and throughout the novel, searches for the possibility of a meaningful shared existence beyond the grim gyres of politics and history that sharply divide the characters.

The novel consists of two sections set thirty years apart: class reunions in 1963 and 1993 that are tension filled because of the classmates’ differing postures toward the state in the intervening years. The premise of a small-town reunion is apt, given the novel’s overwhelming focus on the past, on making vivid again youthful events and experiences from the early 1940s, like buying a wedding present for a teacher, important enough for the participants to make them feel as if the grandest dramas were unfolding in a little corner of a Nazi-occupied country.

Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Márquez’s Macondo, and Hardy’s Wessex, Škvorecký’s Kostelec is a grand recreation of his own town, a decidedly minor place to outward appearances, yet rich enough to its creator. I asked Škvorecky why he has returned to the past in Kostelec across the decades of his writing. “Because when you are a teenager, everything appears as new,” he said. “Your impressions are much stronger. Falling in love, for instance. I fell in love with my first girl when I was in prima, the first grade in an eight-grade gymnasium. A new girl came to our town, whom I later called Irene [in my fiction]. It was as if God had switched on a brilliant lamp in the skies above our drab wartime world.”

That the past remains as vivid and locally contained as it does for Škvorecký suggests the author’s strongest, most evident literary influence. As a reader, translator, and novelist, he explained, he “fell under the spell of what I used to call Faulkner’s white magic. I realized that what he wrote about was the content of the mind, the inner life of folks who might appear as very simple but, in fact, inside were as complex as people of high education.” He also admired Faulkner’s “stylistic fireworks,” and “the admixture of pop literature” — like detective and pulp fiction — one finds in his otherwise densely modernist work. Škvorecký has himself written or co-written (with Salivarová) a series of detective novels, and he explained the odd circumstances of his first reading the genre.

“At thirty-three, and newly married, I spent four months in the infectious ward of a hospital — no visitors,” he said. “People could send you books, and my friends did send me books, but because it was an infectious ward the books were non-returnable. The literary works my friends were able to part with without breaking their hearts were old detective novels.” He took to them, not surprising given the alternatives: “True, the hospital had a library, but it was full of Lenin and awful socialist-realist fiction.”

That Škvorecký more substantively took to Faulkner, given his description of the revealing work the Mississippian did for the inner lives of outwardly simple people, is not surprising; as I read Ordinary Lives, Sartre’s famous account of the experience of reading Faulkner — like sitting backwards in a car driving forward — repeatedly came to mind. Much of the novel’s substance depends, in Danny’s words, upon “what many had discovered before me, that the source of everything in man is the past, and then everything is utterly forgotten.” In one of the novel’s strongest passages, Danny tells the story of Brunhilde Brunnenschatten-Cvancarova, his ethnic German teacher who marries an ethnic Czech during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Her students give her a fancy coffee grinder as a wedding gift, and Danny writes her a poem in German, but neither is of help when the newlyweds must decide how to avoid the consequences of her act of Rassenschande, of having “committed a racial misdemeanour” as her new, lesser-Aryan husband bitterly puts it. With Danny listening in, neighbours offer various suggestions — divorce, pregnancy, the husband’s abandoning his nationality for his wife’s — for the couple to avoid being sent to the camps for polluting Aryan bloodlines.

Brunhilde is open to the second option, a doctor’s, but then assumes the child would be taken away from her. The doctor predicts otherwise:

“By that time the circumstances will be quite different. In the fall, the Germans will have other things to worry about. In the worst case…by then you’ll be breastfeeding and that can be declared essential to the health of the child for at least two years. And by that time...”

“I hope you’re right,” [she] sighed.