The notion of having a baby and then breastfeeding in hopes of surviving until a better turn in a world war is pristinely logical in a world of absurdist first principles, where the state’s bruising reach far exceeds its rationales.

Such absurdities seem to figure in the novel’s late invocation of “indifference, the kind [Danny] had only experienced in Canada when I realized, with a sensation of bliss, that nothing could happen to me there...Indifference, our mother, our salvation, our destruction.” Once more, Škvorecký reaches from the quotidian to higher things, from signalling the comparative ease of life a Cold War exile might find as an immigrant in a place like Canada, to a more abstract formulation of humanity’s relationship to indifference itself.

In conversation, he explained that he’d first used this triad of indifference in his 1963 novel The Emöke Legend, which he refines when Danny observes, “Today I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.” Why, I asked him, does indifference retain its saving power? “If you were not indifferent, in a certain sense, in the days of Nazism or Communism, you would go mad,” he answered. “Because there were so many victims, you accepted it as a hard fact of life. Nobody weeps reading about six million dead, but if you read the story of one concrete, individual person, you can have a rapport with that person’s suffering. The greatness of literature is that it can move you that way.”

The moving final lines of Ordinary Lives reach beyond both indifference and suffering to a mystical plane. Danny describes the melancholy beauty of a “black mountain looming darkly over the town under a heaven full of stars,” before beginning to pray himself to a dreamless sleep in the timeless language of the Church: “Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institucione formati, audemus dicere: Pater noster...” I asked Škvorecký if this interplay of heavenly sky, Latin prayer, and dreamless sleep suggested a culminating moment of serenity for his alter ego. “Yes,” he answered. One breath later, he countered, “or of giving up hope.”

Then he started in on another story from the deep past, about an uncle who was a priest. At the end of the war, when the American troops came to liberate his town, the priest had a chat in the ancient language with a GI while hiding behind a tank during a firefight. “Yes, Latin under fire,” he said, smiling at my disbelief. His answer to my final question was the answer of a modern European writer whose life and half century of books testify to the brutalities and absurdities that can come of a world governed by reducing the baroque amplitude of human life to servile singularities. It was an answer that, like much of the greatness that is Škvorecký, was vigorous with the soulful, comical, transcendent power of truth telling through telling stories.