Marek Šindelka - an art-house thriller, by turns lyrical, poignant, and visceral. The story unfolds, appropriately, like some over-nourished plant, with roots and tendrils inexorably spreading in all directions and over the years, entangling, penetrating—and frequently strangling

Marek Šindelka, Aberrant, Trans. by Nathan Fields, Twisted Spoon Press, 2017.
[ excerpt ]


The remarkable debut novel from Marek Sindelka, Aberrant is a multifaceted work that mixes and mashes together a variety of genres and styles to create a heady concoction of crime story, horror story (inspired by the Japanese tradition of kaidan), ecological revenge fantasy, and Siberian shamanism. Nothing is what it seems. What appears to be human is actually a shell occupied by an alien spirit, or demon, and what appears to be an unassuming plant is an aggressive parasite that harbors a poisonous substance within, or manifests itself as an assassin, a phantom with no real substance who pursues his victims across Europe and through a post-apocalyptic Prague ravaged by floods. The blind see, and the seeing are blind. Through these devices, Sindelka weaves a tale of three childhood friends, the errant paths their lives take, and the world of rare plant smuggling - and the consequences of taking the wrong plant - to show the rickety foundation of illusions on which our relationship to the environment, and to one another, rests. It is a world of aberrations, anomalies, and mistakes.

The story unfolds, appropriately, like some over-nourished plant, with roots and tendrils inexorably spreading in all directions and over the years, entangling, penetrating—and frequently strangling. Aberrant is by turns lyrical, poignant, and visceral—all fertilised by the author’s wide-ranging poetic imagination.

— John Howard, Wormwood

Aberrant by Marek Šindelka is a brilliantly written and ingeniously constructed novel ... when finished the reader is left with a liberating feeling of catharsis befitting the dramas of antiquity and medieval legends.

— Czech Radio

  Aberrant is a wide-ranging novel that begins with the death of one of the main characters, Kryštof Warjak, and then elements from the police investigation into it -- the lead investigator, Antonín Brom, pulled off the case, but some of the documents dealing with the case reproduced here. It is a mystifying death, but turns out to be one that is obviously -- yet bafflingly -- connected to several other gruesome murders. So Aberrant is a sort of murder mystery -- yet the crime-puzzler aspect is only part of the story, and it hardly unfolds or reads like your usual mystery. Among other things, then, Aberrant is also a (fairly well-grounded) science fiction tale, and a story of obsessions.
       The three parts of the novel are titled: 'Kryštof', 'Andrei', and 'The Flower' -- the three main characters, as it were. Kryštof and Andrei were childhood friends, though they drifted apart. Both fell in love with the beautiful Nina when they were young; it was Andrei who married her, but they named their daughter Kristýna. When Kryštof comes to visit them, after a long time apart, Nina, neglected by Andrei, is drawn to him; tragedy -- in a novel full of it -- ensues.
       While the novel opens with Kryštof's death, it does not (only) proceed from there, but rather also circles back, slowly filling in the story of how he got there. The unusual nature of his death -- he's found in a what seems to be a toxic circle of complete lifelessness, which even insects remain at the periphery of, while the autopsy reveals something that is then hardly surprising but certainly abnormal -- can be traced to his work trafficking in exotic, rare plants.
       Šindelka nicely leads Kryštof to and describes this niche-field of the exotic-plant-obsessed, which offers remunerative employment, where a few weeks traveling in remote jungles earn Kryštof enough to live for the rest of the year. Plant-life (and what turns out to be a little more than just plant-life ...) is used effectively throughout the novel, from the opening scene which also introduces Kryštof's fear of the giant hogweed plant (Heracleum mantegazzianum), a remarkable weed whose sap is phototoxic, meaning it is more or less harmless unless exposed to ultraviolet light (like sunlight ...), in which case it causes damaging blisters and scars. Indeed, some of these real-life examples of plant-life Šindelka weaves into his story seem only slightly less strange (or indeed unlikely) than the fantastical one at the heart of it.
       The other brutal deaths that occur are apparently linked, and lead back to Kryštof's last venture, stealing a plant from Japan. Kryštof did get the plant -- but ultimately at too high a cost. Andrei -- with a death sentence of his own hanging over him -- eventually also entangles himself in these strange occurrences.
       Aberrant sprials towards its resolution (and explanations), in a narrative that repeatedly veers off in unexpected directions; a great deal is, essentially backstory -- including far back, all the way to the childhoods of Kryštof and Andrei. Impressively, Šindelka sustains the narrative tension, and the story -- largely by balancing evocative description with just enough (often slightly strange and mysterious) action. He also doesn't overwhelm the story where he could -- there's a large-scale flood for example, deluging even much of Prague, but it doesn't sweep the whole story with it. Meanwhile, the mysterious plant at the heart of the novel, and its nature, are guardedly revealed over the course of the story, so that it is always a sort of significant and dark presence, yet whose full import -- its true essence, and their consequences -- is only fully understood near the end.
       The very frequent switching back and forth, in perspective, time, and style, can irritate at times (though Šindelka does manage to maintain a certain flow to it all), and not all the pieces are successful, but it's a neat story that's consistently intriguing. And for such a dark tale -- there is a lot of tragedy here, and a lot of death -- it is surprisingly far from simply being bleak. Though somewhat like the effects of hogweed-sap, the bright spots practically blister too ..... - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ceska/sindelkam.htm


A word of warning: Aberrant is not for the faint of heart. If the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors brings back unsettling memories, know that Marek Šindelka’s debut novel has something much darker in store.
Rich and atmospheric, it comes as no surprise that Šindelka, already an award-winning poet in the Czech Republic, studied screenwriting in Prague. The third person narrator essentially acts as the novel’s cinematographer:

They were taking the train somewhere. He and his mom. Evening. End of summer. Speed. Countryside near the Polish border. The compartment smelled of iron, imitation leather, linoleum flooring. He was standing on the armrest of the seat, choking down the draft of wind rushing alongside the train. … The sun went down behind the forests of spruce on the hills, and a chill spread over the countryside. The fragrance of the river. A long expanse of fields. The train slowed, gradually decelerated, eventually settling into a footpace.

Layered onto this fragmentary opening scene are a series of traumatic events in the lives of two men whose stories intertwine and embrace along a deceptively simple romantic storyline.
Kryštof Warjak is a rare plant smuggler on his final and most dangerous job. Andrei is his brooding childhood best friend, a haughty renegade still suffering from the brutality of life in a rural orphanage. In their adolescent summers, the two friends fell in love with the same girl, Nina, who eventually married Andrei. Kryštof stops spending his holidays in the Czech countryside and, lacking any expected bitterness, even starts to forget them.
After many years of separation, Andrei listens to Kryštof talk about his work, and the old friends expose themselves beautifully without any authorial heavy-handedness:

Andrei did not try to interrupt Kryštof anymore. He listened and contemplated Kryštof’s character.

“Parastites are voyeurs. They eavesdrop on the chemical conversations of others! Like myco-heterotrophs…based on chemical signals they first sniff out potential hosts, a kind of green mycorrhizal plant, basically flowers whose root system is connected to a fungal symbiont…The myco-heterotroph sponges off the cooperation and mutual exchange between a green plant and a mushroom. It tricks the mushroom fiber by making roots that feign symbiosis. Then the confused mushroom feeds it, assuming it’s the green plant it’s connected to. Genius…!”

And he continues in the same vein for some half a dozen pages (“Non-chlorophyllic subterranean parasites also have quite an interesting sex life…”), while Andrei tunes out and refills his drink. Kryštof’s childlike devotion, not only to the minutiae of plant life, but also to Nina, becomes increasingly evident. Andrei, however, playing a perfect Cain to Kryštof’s Abel, descends into a poignant melancholy.
Andrei’s “delusional expectation of punishment,” as Freud defined melancholia, is fulfilled in the colossal breakdown he suffers after the death of his daughter, which serves to showcase Šindelka’s penchant for dream sequences and symbolism. The grieving father is eaten alive, pulverized and boiled, then meticulously constructed again in a sprawling fever dream punctuated by sections of myth and poetry. While this ambidextrous approach works most of the time, the unexpected switch from prose to poetry risks pulling the reader out of an otherwise spellbinding narrative.
After Andrei’s breakdown, it is Kryštof, the peculiar plant enthusiast, who can offer Nina another life and the intimate companionship she desires. It is often said that the past catches up with a person, but in this case it is Kryštof who reaches backward to drag it into the present. Driven by a desire to walk away from his high-risk career and settle down with Nina, he takes on a parlous job that spooks even his most trusted colleague.
His task is to deliver a single flower from a decaying villa in Japan to a wealthy collector in Russia, a man who is “no gardener” and owns no “stuffy greenhouse full of tropical stink,” but instead keeps only the rarest specimens in glass vessels that carefully mimick their natural habitats.
There is something inescapably cinematic about how the decrepit Japanese estate enters into view:

A wooden building, a broad roof with pieces of thatch missing like teeth, torn paper walls, rugs. The empty square shape of the floor. Outside crickets, otherwise silence. In the middle of the room sat a wide clay bowl covered by a lid with a massive handle.

What Kryštof finds beneath the lid is the novel’s pinnacle of abject horror, a pitiful and nauseating scene. It is Šindelka’s haptic suggestiveness that works to subvert the human relationship with the natural world – from the moment Kryštof acquires the prized plant, it is clear that more than human agency is at work. However, if there is a moral message, it is subdued by the visceral horror of the parasitic flower, which Kryštof smuggles embedded in his side—a rather Christ-like location—out of the country and on a nail-biting race through Central Europe.
The final section of the book is an ode to the Japanese genre of kaidan, a vaguely moralizing story that is at once rare, bewitching, and rather gruesome. Traditionally, kaidan included some element of ghostly vengeance, often by those who become more powerful in death than they were in life, such as children or servants. In Aberrant, it appears to be nature itself that enacts its revenge for human greed.
From its opening panorama to its dire final chapters, Aberrant reads like an art-house thriller. Ripe and vivid, this first novel is a testament to Šindelka’s skill and meticulous research, as well as his honest esteem for an often ignored but ever-present natural world. One closes the book feeling fatigued and uneasy, just as intended. We can look forward to English translations of the author’s later works, including an award-winning novel on the refugee crisis, to combine Aberrant’s audacity with the assuredness and restraint of a writer reaching maturity.
Finally, Twisted Spoon Press must be given compliments for the novel’s stunning presentation—its polished white design and the delicate pencil drawings of Czech artist Petr Nikl make the book a pleasure to hold. - Hannah Weber, Necessary Fiction

Aberrant is a deliberately paced novel. Dealing as it does in sensory description, the narrative is by turns immaculately beautiful and incredibly boring.

I won’t judge this as a crime novel, because it’s not that (though it’s billed that way in the ad copy). I also don’t see it as an “ecological revenge fantasy.” Instead it reads like a series of synesthetic impressions linked together by moments of brief character work. Along the edges of the narrative are suggestions of structural daring and multilayered mystery, but none of it is fleshed out or explored.

Marek Šindelka’s narrative, such as it is, concerns Kryštof Warjak, a smuggler of rare plants. He is tasked with retrieving a parasitic rarity from Japan. The plant is pitch black, a pure embodiment of sadness and misery. Warjak and his prospective buyers are pursued by a demon that possesses the bodies of those it touches. There is a scene with a plastic bottle of Coke that shows sadistically entertaining imagination.

Warjak’s childhood friend Andrei takes up a section, as does their mutual friend (and third point on the love triangle) Nina, though her character is barely addressed at all. In fact, as soon as the book begins to flirt with this aspect of its plot, it shies away, shifts temporally, goes somewhere else. Most of the sex and violence takes place “off-camera,” which is really a shame, considering the narrative’s pulpy premise.

Šindelka’s writing is truly something to behold, and that’s why the book is worth reading. The copy does its best to sell the book as a thriller, or a magical bizarro fable, but what makes it work are the long passages in which the author describes train stations, flooded cities, greenhouses, and the plants therein. Despite a few repetitions of sensory input (the smell of metal left from a person’s palm having touched a railing, for example, is used over and over again, almost a motif), the language is crisp and clear and frankly quite beautiful, a tribute to both the author and Nathan Fields, the translator.

Aberrant is difficult to put down, but not for the reasons its packaging would have you believe. As a gripping thriller, it is a complete failure. Toward the end of the narrative, Šindelka decides to take a ten-page detour into the boredom and stress of waiting for a train to leave a station. As a character study it also falls flat, as Andrei and Nina and Kryštof are prone to either long, unnatural diatribes on the nature of plants or over-the-top displays of emotion and grief (disappearing into the woods for days at a time, stripping naked, rubbing mud all over their bodies). This is, I suppose, a novel that really does seem to understand its immediate outer world better than anything interior. The journey through a flooded Prague, through fields of poisonous hogweed, through back alleys littered with cigarette butts is one worth taking, if you’re patient and willing to take it. - J. David Osborne

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2017/september/aberrant-marek-sindelka

“Think Orlean’s The Orchid Thief on acid. It’s all kinds of funky, and in the hands of a lesser writer (and translator), it could have been little more than a hot, indulgent mess. But Šindelka never loses his thread, which is saying something about a novel wherein losing the thread is part of the point. We’re on shaky ground in 2017, people, and Šindelka’s world of ‘aberrations, anomalies, and mistakes’ feels unnervingly timely, and is enormously fun in the bargain. Everyone wins.” - M. Bartley Seigel

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-watchlist-may-2017-m-bartley-seigel