‘A day devoted to staying in is the music of a melody nobody has
ever played. And when I do have to go out, there’s a bloom coating
the people I pass, a frost blurring their features. I can imagine
they don’t exist, and in this way love them.’
The Czech writer
Zuzana Brabcová opens her novel in her unique and free-flowing
style, in which the absurdity of everyday life blends with the
figments of the imagination of its protagonist, Bĕta, a middle-aged
woman who suddenly finds herself on the fringes of society in Prague,
‘a city full of injustice that nobody ever got used to, not the
nation, not the private individual’. The labyrinth of her life is
asymmetrically constructed through snippets of grotesque diary
entries, surreal dreams, lyrical verses, witty word play, insightful
and clever dialogue, bizarre journal entries, symbolism, and
mythology. It is as if she has found refuge in her insanity. Bĕta’s
misery, alienation and post-communist disillusionment are well
crafted, and captured without self-pity, reflecting the ageing
woman’s dignity and humour as she searches for humanity. In spite
of numerous failures in her attempts to get a job, she stays
pragmatic and unfazed:
‘I was likewise
unsuitable for the position of housekeeper, as would become evident
later when visiting some high-end villa in Vokovice, because
apparently I looked – so said the owner – like a Shishimora
…Wikipedia soon informed me that this is a female boogieman from
Slavic mythology – Kikimora in Czech – a hideous old hag dressed
in rags who kidnaps kids.’
Bĕta’s
interaction with her mother and daughter and her friend Melda,
homeless like her, gives a particular edge to the narrative that
swings from past to present and back again, oscillating between
fantasy and reality, provocation and preposterousness. Bĕta’s
story is that of an invisible woman, forgotten and abandoned, holding
on to her only possession: memory, intertwined with surreal
hallucinations. Through Bĕta, Zuzana Brabcova gives a voice not only
to her but to all overlooked women who have been swallowed and
forgotten in the dark and brutal transformation of society that
followed the collapse of communism.
This book is best
tackled slowly, for its subtleties and rich cynicism. Tereza
Novická’s lively translation makes it a pleasure to read. - Silvia
Sovic
https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-silvia-sovic-reviews-aviaries-by-zuzana-brabcova/
The critic was at
the park with her four-year-old niece. They had snacks, sang songs,
played on the swings and the slide before the girl found a large
stick, went over to a maple, and began hitting its trunk.
Concentrated, determined, she whapped the bark methodically. The
critic wasn’t sure what to do.
As she watched, an
image came to mind from the novel she was reviewing next, Aviaries,
by the Czech writer Zuzana Brabcová, who died in 2015. It was the
last book she’d written, but the first of her works to be
translated into English. On the title page was a black-and-white
drawing of a woman with the body of a tree; in her womb a snake with
bared fangs encircled a globe with a human face.
Her niece’s stick
broke. She laughed, found another, and went on smacking the tree. It
seemed disrespectful—a word the critic associated with her father,
gone six years now. If he’d been there he would’ve put a gentle
but quick stop to this tree-bashing. Disrespectful. Not constructive.
She wasn’t sure
how she’d review the novel in just four-hundred words, the limit
her editor had given her without a hint of apology. The unspoken
facts were: novel in translation, small publisher, unknown dead
female Czech author. It was the kind of disappointment she’d begun
to accept, telling herself any press for books like this was
worthwhile. Maybe a long blog post about it, in addition to the
short, paid review, would make her feel better.
Because it deserved
more. With singular, controlled balance Brabcová had delivered one
of the most unrelenting character portraits the critic had ever read.
The narrator, Alzběta, who goes by Běta, is a destitute writer in
modern-day Prague. In very short chapters she looks at her life and
the world, confronting memory, poverty, imagination, entropy,
exhaustion, substance abuse, loneliness, and artistry, the entire
range of physical, emotional, quasi-spiritual experiences. It’s as
if she’s found a way to leave her body, at age 54, and see her
existence from all sides, with fearsome insight. Several times, she
uses a tree as the key symbol of herself, sometimes walking,
sometimes bloody and damaged.
At a little more
than a hundred pages, the novel seemed to contain more than entire
shelves of books. Its detailed structure of themes and motifs formed
a conceptual framework with great connotative power, like a field of
emotional constellations. It was mesmerizing, adopting the
conventions of a romantic, humanistic novel; no overwrought dramatic
irony or sarcasm, an almost impossibly successful narrative order of
personal and political events depicting a gloomy quest to see reality
for what it is as a loner, writer, friend, mother and daughter, made
compelling through Běta’s palpably real character, who’s
vulnerable, contradictory, funny, erudite, curious, and frustrating,
focused on the essence of life and death, from the underground of
Prague.
For Běta, it’s as
if the rotten state of the world and her health leaves her no choice
but to take stock at this point in her life. After being laid off,
she’s terminally unemployed, without work for 428 tedious,
desperate days. She lives in a basement apartment she calls a cell
and considers herself homeless. She writes, but on “a computer too
old to sell” arranged atop “a baking sheet propped up on two
bricks.” She’s been hospitalized 21 times in three years, mostly
for mental illness. “I simply became addicted to the white coat,”
she says, making light of it, but later admits she sometimes visits
four doctors a day because her heat’s been turned off at home.
Some of the small
sections bear dates like diary entries, ranging from December 2011 to
February 2015. The story begins two days after Václav Havel’s
death, prompting statewide grief that Běta says “reigns” over
life, part of the larger “process of disintegration” she can’t
help but scrutinize with fearsome intensity.
As the critic read,
it was as if each day for Běta without work, living alone, had been
snapped off from the world and examined as a small piece of text
pasted to each page like a specimen of time. Her first thought was to
call them fragments, but the term carried interpretative weight, and
clumsily so. There was no prefabricated structure Brabcová had
cracked up and re-used. This was a sophisticated, nuanced shifting
set of tones, voices, and relative meanings within a layered,
philosophical whole.
As for key
characters, Běta’s sole friend, a man named Melda, whom she met in
the neurological ward five years ago, isn’t much comfort. “You’re
a sieve, Běta, just a sieve merely sifting through other people’s
identities,” he says, sounding much like an inner voice at times.
She’s so lonely, though, that she invites him to live with her,
calling him a “pot” she can pour her life into. It’s one of
several believable blind spots the author gives her—rather than
pour her life into her writing, or finding another person to confide
in, she favors a toxic relationship with Melda. He provides a
reflection she craves, for better or for worse: “(I) truly saw him,
powerless and paralyzed, in all the glorious shabbiness of his lost
existence: the graying façade of a face cracked with wrinkles, thin,
greasy hair, colorless fish eyes. I felt ashamed for the sympathy
that gripped my heart, for his plastered wretchedness was
indistinguishable from my own.”
In the margin near
this quote, the critic would later notice she’d written,
“Friendship, bodies, sickened by time.”
At the park, her
niece had started to hit the tree like a drummer, with a stick in
each hand. The critic let her, even as bits of bark began to fly. She
doubted the girl knew what she was doing. Just acting on bored
impulse. Maybe this was bad babysitting. She’d step in, somehow,
soon enough. Maybe offer her some juice.
Out in the world,
Brabcová shows Prague as Běta sees and feels and breathes it.
“(When) I do go out, there’s a bloom coating the people I pass, a
frost blurring their features. I can imagine they don’t exist, and
in this way love them. All that exists: just disrupts and mars.”
There’s a masterful balance of the real and surreal in Běta’s
mind, letting neither the objective nor the creative view dominate as
she looks through a sort of dark kaleidoscope with X-ray vision. To
her, a parked SUV isn’t merely a symbol of excess, it’s “a Land
Rover smothering the entire street like a gigantic tombstone,” a
specific marker of a dead world. A neighbor’s pet snake is at first
a pest she fears upon first seeing it loose in the hallway outside
her apartment. Later, it’s a way to connect with the neighbor, when
she also buys a snake, so they can breed them. Then she sees the
serpent as an archetype of chaos and dangerous memories, a natural
force loose in her thoughts with the power to crawl through holes in
reality. Last of all, her grown daughter, Alice, becomes a cobra
towering over a train station.
When Brabcová
writes more playfully — “I reached for a cloud and shoved it
under my sweater,” or “the wind deftly scooped me up with its
spatula like a pancake and we flew over the rooftops” — a
contrast occurs, one of empowering statements that subvert the limits
of the physical world momentarily in an otherwise dark stretch of
time.
Within this balance,
Brabcová adds scientific rationale to the dynamic between fact and
fiction in Běta’s worldview. She quotes theories of space and
time, makes reference to tunnels within tunnels, and the speed of
neutrino particles. Some sections act as sidebars to the plot, little
groups of war headlines, vacation ads, strange-but-true facts that
show how widely her eye on the world ranges. She craves a full view
of reality, all the violence, fascism, rifts and nonsense of
capitalism, seeing them as equal forces weighing on her personal
myths, be it her mother’s habit of marking an X beside the dead in
the dictionary, or perceived dangers about the particle accelerator
at CERN.
Her mother’s
influence is ever-present. During a visit, her mother, who’s in her
late eighties, quotes Jiří Wolker, her favorite Czech poet, who
wrote, “Death is a mere hard part of life.” A dark joke, it
seems, from a gloomy parent; yet later Běta mentions the family lost
a young son and brother, Igor, to suicide. Wolker’s line has become
a touchstone and despite its grim overtone, the critic saw how in
Novická’s translation, “mere” was paired with “hard,” and
the line ended with “life,” as if Wolker’s goal, perhaps, was
actually to put death in its rightful place, among the hard parts,
but not necessarily among the most important.
Běta’s daughter,
Alice, who’s twenty-three, visits and calls rarely. Běta imagines
conversations with her; in one Alice recalls a dream in which Běta
is a tree that needs to be chopped free — something Alice helps
her achieve by leaving Prague. The episode reads like inventive
self-defense on Běta’s part for some unsaid failure. She shows her
true level of anxiety at times, saying directly that she feels “as
if nothing were genuine anymore, as if every second extended hundreds
of possibilities, countless parallel options, but none that held
true.” She imagines that to survive, some people must stay
connected to a purity that doesn’t exist on earth by way of an
enormous snorkel; she imagines they walk the city streets with “an
endless hollow tube penetrating into the cosmos and curving alongside
it, only from there inhaling that which makes life imaginable, indeed
even possible.”
The way the past and
present exist in Beta’s mind, her pain and connection to others,
the life of Prague around her, whether described in affecting simple
detail or fantastic metaphor, is all delivered without unnecessary
heat or flourish, in steadied diction and word choice—all the
product of Novická’s expertly capable translation. The critic had
read it worrying the tightrope act would fail, that the intricately
woven minor mysteries of each moment would raise too many questions
of sincerity and believability. But the translation held together
brilliantly. In part because Brabcová wasn’t playing at surrealism
for effect, or to correct or pander to any readers’ possible
preconceived notions about her mental condition. Normal life is
astounding, and the astounding aspects of life are normal. Běta is
mentally ill and poor, no fool, wary of any kind of pity in any form,
never connecting the way she sees the world with her illness.
Eventually, she gets
full disability from the government due to the severity of it. Her
mother has a heart attack and ends up in the hospital with the family
praying around her bed.
The critic could see
Běta’s desire to be alone to face the meaning of life, death, and
suffering, as a mother while watching her own mother die, had come at
a great cost in terms of optimism. “Awareness, and yet a remarkable
emptiness,” Běta thinks, “for all these props — and even my
speech is a prop — are just an accretion of completely empty
squares.” She yearns to be closer to Alice, and feels it’s out of
reach: “(If) only you knew how much I miss you. I wish I could be
the cove you submerge into…or that I could manage, at least for a
short while, to bear the mire of life like a rose.” And when she
dwells on the hardest moments of her life when she had raised Alice
alone, she can still feel the fear as it “wraps and tightens around
my neck like a bathrobe belt.”
If the critic looked
as directly at her life as this, would she find more joy or despair?
Had grief over her father’s death blurred her vision of herself
over the past few years, or sharpened her view of a life’s
trajectory? Marriage and children still didn’t interest her. Her
writing career was fine; she was still freelancing, earning plenty
for herself at her marketing day job. No other fantasy career lay
ahead at a magazine or cultural foundation. Where were her mother and
sister headed? What was going to happen to her niece? Exploring the
mysteries of life as quotidian puzzles, Brabcová’s novel insisted
that how we apprehend these things does still matter.
When the critic
finally stood and walked over to her niece, the girl wouldn’t stop
hitting the tree, not even for some juice. The critic had to wrench
the stick away.
“You’re not my
Mom, stupid!” the girl shouted.
“I know,” the
critic said, stepping backwards. “I’m your aunt.”
“No, you’re
not!” the girl said. “You’re nothing.”
Ten minutes later,
the girl was humming to herself in the car seat. The critic looked
back at her from time to time in the rear-view mirror. The girl sang
and clapped. The world went flashing by. - Matthew Jakubowski
http://textshopexperiments.org/textshop06/book-review-aviaries
Composed like a
twenty-first century flashback to Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a
Madman,” Zuzana Brabcová’s excellent, final novel Aviaries is a
surrealist collage of memories, anxieties, and fantasies. Loosely
episodic, Aviaries follows the daily journals of a mother fading into
obscurity: although full of unconditional love for both her daughter
and aged mother, she feels too far removed from both generational
poles to be an effective feminine force. She drifts through her past
and through cut-up histories (both contemporary and long forgotten)
in search of some kind of resonance amidst all the meaninglessness
around her.
Brabcová’s prose
rests comfortably, strangely, in between, caught somewhere in the
middle of past and present, fantasy and reality, literature and
poetry. Lines from psalms by Czech poet Ivan Diviš are scattered
throughout the book, seamlessly integrated between blurry dream
sequences. Aviaries repeatedly spirals out in madcap surreality, all
while humming with a real-life relatable humility. In one scene, the
narrator visits her psychiatrist, Dr. Gnuj (“Jung” in reverse),
and while it’s easy to get unglued amidst the novel’s trippy
waiting-room antics featuring talking masks and a lounge piano, the
fantasies melt away as the narrator learns she could collect
disability benefits on account of her being unfit to work.
Seemingly
non-sequitur vignettes are riddled throughout Aviaries; as jarring as
they are memorable, they expand the book’s themes of
interstitiality. In one, Brabcová recounts a “fatal printing
error” in which “Gennady Musatov’s illustrations to
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov went astray and ended up in the
Czech edition of In Search of Lost Time.” In a later diary entry,
the narrator explains “while the contours of some memories were
preserved and stayed intact, others collapsed and blended together.”
In a digression about Rorschach tests, “even memory is just a play
of colors and shapes behind eyelids shut in a desire for
non-existence.” These moments transform the novel into something
larger than simply an experimental work about memory and surrealism;
Brabcová circles around a metaphysical, inescapable transition, when
a person’s presence and influence dissipates into another’s
remembrance.
The relationship
between the narrator and her daughter, a dumpster-diving punk named
Alice, provides some clues. In another drifting memory, “this was
an image of you, Alice,” she recalls. “You’re already
dissolving, receding, changing, thinning, waning into the distance,
and yet it’s as if someone has burned the image into the back of my
brain.” By the end of the novel, she finds a way to untangle Jung:
Brabcová includes a passage directly from the psychoanalyst, which
details his understanding of the female archetype and her spirit
(which he calls the “Kore”):
The psyche
pre-existent to consciousness (e.g., in a child) participates in the
maternal pysche on the one hand, while on the other it reaches across
to the daughter psyche. We could therefore say that every mother
contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and
that every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into
her daughter.
The fractured,
psychologically prismatic Aviaries could be considered a diagram of a
mother’s brain. Despite its nightmarish hallucinations, talking
animals, hidden traumas, and journal entries with dates like “the
Fifty-first of Marchember, 2851,” Aviaries, above all, is about
motherhood in flux. Brabcová hides a devastating layer at the
novel’s core about mothers continuing to live through the lives of
their daughters, and shows the struggle of one mother coming to
realize the increasing importance of her memories and the woman she
was, and how these past moments may overshadow any further potential
left in her life. - Jeff Alford
https://www.raintaxi.com/two-takes-aviaries/#alford
Aviaries begins in
the days after the death in 2011 of the political dissident,
playwright, and first post-communist Czech President Václav Havel.
Soon after Havel’s passing, the novel’s narrator Běta, opens up
a comments stream under an online article about him and finds the
post, “Hope he’s rotting in hell.” She reflects, “In the murk
of scum, in the silent and holy night, revulsion stirred.”
Havel’s loss sets
the stage for this bewildering book. If Havel represents the triumph
of good over evil, hope for a better future, and humanism winning out
against totalitarianism, his death symbolizes the vanishing belief in
the promise of a euphoric post-totalitarian era. More than that,
Havel’s death seems to have awoken powerful social forces made up
of people who never believed in the causes he represented. In
Aviaries, the crashing down of this grandest of national myths
splinters into a fragmentary narrative amid a surreal and bleak urban
landscape—one that feels horrifying true. Post-Havel Prague, in
Brabcová’s vivid imagination, is a world of fetishistic
materialism, neoliberal social disaster, sickness, and death. An
uneasy refrain echoes through the book’s pages, setting the novel’s
mood: “Something is happening. Something’s in the air. Something
isn’t right.”
Aviaries is
structured as a collection of textual fragments written or curated by
Běta, a woman in her mid-fifties. Běta has been out of work for
over a year when the novel opens. Her daughter Alice has left Prague
for the south of Spain, where she has embraced an anti-materialist
lifestyle and the practice of dumpster diving. In addition to being
poor, Běta also suffers from mental illness, and parts of the
narrative flow through her visits to the psychiatrist Doctor Gnuj.
Together, the breakdowns of her family structure and health push Běta
to the social margins, isolating her socially and economically. This
alienation sharpens her ability to observe the details of everyday
life among other specters of the metropolitan periphery—the poor,
the homeless, the addicts, the chronically insane. The process of
untethering from the “normal” opens up Běta to a kind of truer
vision of the world, despite the vision’s temporally chaotic,
fantastical quality. This irony—the imaginative and surreal as
truer than the real—is reflected in an interaction between Běta
and Doctor Gnuj, when the psychiatrist tells her: “Your inner world
is like that basement lair of yours. Kick down the doors, file
through the bars! Do you even notice the world around you?” Běta
responds, “I do. Don’t you worry. I know well enough what the
world around me lives for: the season of wine tastings and
exhibitions of corpses.”
Two relationship
triads provide a modicum of structure to the book. The first and most
significant triad is that between Běta, her aged mother, and her
errant daughter Alice. More than any other element, this generational
dynamic creates a temporal rhythm in Aviaries, blending past and
present, gesturing toward the future: “One minute Alice is bouncing
around in the blueberries, she’s two years old, the next she’s
barely hobbling along, an old woman she is yet to become.” Or this
startling line, after Běta witnesses a girl wearing a Microsoft
T-shirt, a junkie, “writhing and undulating” against the
“piss-soaked wall” of a bus stop, “long past due for the
morgue.” Běta tells her daughter, “In another time and place
this was an image of you, Alice. You’re already dissolving,
receding, changing, thinning, waning into the distance.” Brabcová
deploys the figure of the snake, with its Jungian overtones of both
creativity/fertility and destruction/death/danger, to hold this triad
in a quivering relational field:
I’m coming back
home, down the hallway by the basement stalls. . . . Above my head,
the lights turn on automatically, one by one. I suddenly spot a snake
edging toward me across the concrete floor. It goes still. I go
still. It raises its head, flat and speckled. We watch each other
warily, a barely audible hiss from the light bulbs.
The second
relational triad connects Běta with the homeless lunatic Melda and
to the girl in the Microsoft T-shirt, who eventually comes to squat
in the “ruin” across the street from her apartment. Melda seems
to be Běta’s playful double. With Melda, Běta slips into a
parallel mode of existence in which mundane scenes of poverty and
degradation transform into a realm unbound by the straightjacket of
realism. A trip to the supermarket, for example, ends with the
following: “But the Harpies at the checkout counters, half-women
and half-bird, those goddesses of storm winds, let us pass through
without a fuss, as though we were two transparent fly wings passing
them, the crackling wing-cases of nothingness.” If the symbol of
the generational triad is the snake, that of the lunatic triad is the
caged bird; after Melda’s disappearance from the basement, Běta
runs into him while in IKEA with her sister, and finds him
“completely plastered with black feathers like a raven puppet.”
She asks where he lives now:
He stayed silent for
an unusually long time. . . .
“It’s a secret,
but I’ll tell you . . . Every day I wait here till nine when IKEA
closes. Then I hide in one of the storage spaces in the bedroom
department, and I come out when the coast is clear and it’s all
empty and quiet. At night I wander around a quiet IKEA that belongs
to me alone.”
The bleaker version
of Melda’s absurd capitalistic aviary is the cage of the girl with
the Microsoft T-shirt. She has come to occupy the dilapidated
building across the street, and appears in the space just as Melda
vanishes—Melda’s creative lunacy morphing into a dismal,
hopeless, self-destructive madness. Běta describes the scene when
she offers the girl a bread roll: “She snatched it out of my hand
and bit into it greedily. I looked around: no guts, no lungs, no
liver—just a layer of plaster on a cement floor, just boarded-up
windows, just a layer of plaster on the girl’s sores, just her eyes
boarded up.”
Aviaries is an
unsettling, provocative novel that gets richer with each successive
reading—and it demands and inspires multiple readings. Tereza
Novická’s translation sparkles, moving fluidly across Brabcová’s
intricate assemblage, and the novel’s haunting refrain seems
perfect, a mantra for our age: “Something is happening. Something’s
in the air. Something isn’t right.” - Seth Rogoff
https://www.raintaxi.com/two-takes-aviaries/#alford
Zuzana Brabcová’s
Aviaries, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, is a lesson
in literary phantasmagoria—not for the faint of heart. Composed of
oscillating diary entries, vignettes, dreams, observations, interior
monologue, meditations, short anecdotes, newspaper headlines, and
anecdotes from both poetry and prose, it presents a kaleidoscopic
picture of present-day Prague, a world reeling with political strife
that treats disadvantaged people badly and seldom makes sense.
The novella opens in
2011 with the death of Václav Havel, the last president of
Czechoslovakia. Contemporary news reports and headlines provide a
bleak background to this snapshot of the life of the protagonist,
Alžběta, a woman living on the fringes of a relentlessly
unforgiving Prague. She navigates a world of confusing characters
that exist in and outside her imagination in Prague’s Smíchov
district. She is unemployed and struggling with mental illness. Her
troubled thoughts contribute to the fragmentary nature of the text,
told in both third person and, what can only be described as, a
distant first person. The result is profoundly confusing, yes, but
also strangely satisfying, particularly as it contributes to
Alžběta’s interactions with the women in her life, including her
mother, her sister, and her dumpster-diving, Bob Dylan-dating
daughter, Alice.
Completed just
before Brabcová’s untimely death, Aviaries received the Josef
Škvorecky, a Czech language award, in 2016 for best prose of the
year and, in 2017, was shortlisted for the Magnesia Litera Book of
the Year Award. Czech cultural-political monthly journal Literární
nonviny called it, “A sophisticated testimony about social
exclusion.” And now, Twisted Spoon Press and translator Tereza
Novická have brought it to you. — Hiba Tahir
https://www.arkint.org/reviews/aviaries-capsule-review-49g9r-gc5dm-beja-mzmbc-g7lx2-6nhwb-rw2hw-l85rr-a6e8h-ej98a-nb3f5-x8rhl-pfcwh-7n38h-3w9sh-p32n2-a9sby-4epw7-cb6ma-x5z59-7w8mg-lara3-ps5ap-klrm2-nsph-n7242-elzdh-7b27x-hshx-ej3d8
“what is most
important about this, the last of Brabcová’s gifts, what makes it
deserving of a place in the most minimalist of bookshelves, is its
honest, overwhelming beauty, its celebration of language, imagery,
and humanity, and its tribute to all of life, observed.”
What does it look
like inside a mind ravaged by depression and loneliness? Is there
transcendent beauty to be had from the harvesting of such a mind,
from the culling of its experience of the most abject poverty and
loss of self? In Aviaries, Zuzana Brabcova’s last work before her
death in 2016, the Czech writer uses intricate storytelling patterns
to credibly recreate her protagonist’s advanced lunacy, her
hallucinations, and even her occasional life-saving awareness, while
very clearly answering both questions, the latter with a resounding
yes.
The novel is
composed of the entries in Beta’s diary, begun on December 20,
2011, two days after the death of Václav Havel. The uncertain
political scenario lends the tone of improbable hope amidst the dread
of reality that matches Beta’s financial, physical, and mental
situation, and that is at the center of the story.
“And when I do
have to go out, there’s a bloom coating the people I pass, a frost
blurring their features. I can imagine they don’t exist, and in
this way love them. All that exists just disrupts and mars, as if
somebody had graffiti-tagged The Night Watch. Václav Havel died the
day before yesterday. In his sleep, in the morning. So its reign
extends beyond night.”
Bêta is trying to
come to terms with all she has lost. She is basically homeless, a
squatter of sorts in heatless rooms in which her ghosts, loved ones
past and present, visit her in dreams that read like a succession of
beautiful, surrealist short films.
“His buddies
started to roar with laughter and scattered across the expanse of the
Sacré-Coeur, not caring about the marvelous, unusual view it offered
of Prague, a city full of injustice that nobody ever got used to, not
the nation, not the private individual. In short, they’d become
sour and plunged their arms elbow-deep into garbage cans, and when
they pulled them out again, they were the color of melted chocolate.”
Her mind assaulted
by regret and loneliness, she’s unable to find her way without the
identity she is losing to hunger, age, and illness. And yet she
cannot help but love. She cannot help but give of what little she
has.
Her story moves
forward with glimpses of daughter Alice, who comes to her mother in
dreams while dumpster-diving for basic necessities with beau Bob
Dylan (“only his parents are to blame for his name”), a lit
headlamp her only hat.
“You’re three
months old, sleeping in your crib, clutching a rattle in your tiny
fist. Andrei is just leaving for his night shift in a boiler room . .
. My God, I pray over you, I feel nothing at all. Who are you, you
unfathomable creature? Where did you come from? You are a guest. I
have given birth to a guest.”
Later, when she
dreams Alice needs her and wants to come home, love brings lucidity
and the truths of the heart: “‘Return to my belly,’ I
requested, ‘I’ve already got Grandma’s grave in my chest.’”
We see Bêta’s
selfless love for Melda, a stuttering homeless man she picks up. He
builds her a “cardboard palace” that is really a room of
cardboard inside the outer cardboard of thinner walls, before leaving
her in darkness, colder than before: “This rude stranger for whom
I’d bought whatever he pointed to at Tesco just a few days before
was now parading around in his grandiose cardboard box butt naked,
and the scars that furrowed his body looked like riverbeds through
which time streamed instead of water.”
It would be easy to
confuse Brabcová’s work with loosely linked ramblings, but that
would be a mistake. If we pay attention, readers will discover every
clue she deliberately sets up for the finding, the rounding of each
story to completion, just not the one we expected.
Aviaries is anchored
in history, politics, satire, and humor. Stalin, Mozart, and even
Proust lend height and sound to its metaphors. In turn, the news of
the day, of every day in every place, lend the dose of reality
against which all minds must end their race to feel. But what is most
important about this, the last of Brabcová’s gifts, what makes it
deserving of a place in the most minimalist of bookshelves, is its
honest, overwhelming beauty, its celebration of language, imagery,
and humanity, and its tribute to all of life, observed. - Anjanette
Delgado
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/aviaries
The central figure
in Aviaries is Alžběta (Běta), presented here both in the first
and sometimes third person. The work is presented in short pieces --
dated diary entries as well as others that instead have descriptive
headings. There is a basic chronology here, the opening section dated
20 December 2011 and proceeding (though only occasionally, nowhere
near daily) through March of 2012, then with a gap around mid-way
through, the dating picking up again in January, 2015 and proceeding
not quite sequentially in the few remaining dated entries after
(including a giant leap into the past, to: 'On the 23rd of March,
1966'). The novel offers scenes from a life over this period --
Běta's, in its current, depressed state: "I have no money, no
job, no family".
In fact, Běta
does have some family: flighty daughter Alice, specializing in
dumpster-diving for now; sister Nadia; their octo- and then
nonagenarian mother. Laid off in 2010, she can count the days she's
been out of work (428 when she first mentions it), and she lives in a
basement flat; she's clinically depressed and repeatedly seeks
medical attention, her psychiatrist suggesting:
"How about we
try Mirtazapine ? Or Valdoxan ? Or even ... trazodone ?"
He closed his
eyes at the last word, overcome with delight.
Of course, I
couldn't let that go: "Or meth ? Or maybe fudge or sludge or
heroin ?"
He also
diagnoses:
Your inner
world is like that basement lair of yours. Kick down the doors, file
through the bars ! Do you even notice the world around you ?
In fact she
does; at times, she can even seem hyper-aware -- but she despairs of
this world around her, beginning with the politics: the novel opens
right after the death of Václav Havel. The lost idealism of the
post-Communist Czech Republic is a constant in the background, not
least in the reactions to Havel's death -- notably also in the form
of Alice's first-grade teacher, Marta Semelová, now leader of the
Prague Communists, who: "congratulated the nation on ridding
itself of a pest". (Semelová is a real-life figure, and she was
indeed a teacher before becoming a politician; she crops up
repeatedly in the novel, someone whose baneful influence on her
daughter Běta had to nip in the bud.)
Entries
include scenes of interaction with family and others -- both
realistic and tending to the absurd, such when she encounters her
hockey-obsessed former boss, fully decked out in all his gear,
including skates, in front of the Academy of Sciences while The Rite
of Spring is being performed at the National Theater (and Alice
explores a dumpster). Other entries offer titbits of news and
information, not entirely random but connecting to her story and life
often only in the broadest sense:
More than half
the Russian population has a favorable opinion of Joseph Stalin's
role in Russian history.
Thirteen boys
shot dead by ISIS extremists in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul for
violating the ban on watching soccer.
The plastic bag
ripped.
The needle
disappeared in the fabric.
Near and far,
the last leaf in Prague fell to the ground.
Thoughts of
mortality figure prominently, and a nostalgic sense bubbles to the
surface at times too:
I lift the pot
lid and stare at the bottom of those days. Where have they gone,
where are they now, at this moment, those angels of ours ? The spring
sun bears down on the freshly painted iron bars of my window, as if
it -- a country-fair strongman -- wants to bend them into a
horseshoe.
With its
sharp sense of the absurd but also grounded in the all too-real
contemporary world, Brabcová effectively presents a dark-hued
picture of the present. Obviously also a very personal take, Brabcová
doesn't wallow too deeply in self-pity -- often twisting what might
lead to such feeling sorry for herself into the absurd. Beyond that,
it's her eloquent expression that makes her tale particularly
effective: it reads well throughout, in its expression through Běta
and her various struggles (including with expression ...):
I replied to
another twenty-five job offers today, and as I was about to answer
the twenty-sixth the screen went dark and I spotted the reflection of
my face, which was, just like Melda's creation, thoroughly drained,
baffling, angular, and utterly unemployable. In this dark battle of
blots, in this deathly boring ten-card game, all I can do is describe
it with words quite different to those inside me, words that are
delicate, breezy, and translucent, just like the unknown voice
requested.
Shifting
between the surreal and the real, Aviaries is a poetic summa,
sometimes tighly narrow in its focus, sometimes reaching out broadly,
of what life's come to for Brabcová's aging protagonist, and what
hold she has left on a world that disappoints -- no doubt reflecting
Brabcová's own feeling and experiences. The literary is one small
hold -- a nice touch in the final scenes has books flying out of
flames into Běta's father's arms, a hopeful scene and sense of the
literary as withstanding, impossible to keep down -- and if not
entirely sufficient for the character so at least, for its duration,
a comfort to the reader in the form of this eloquent little
testament. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ceska/brabcovaz.htm
I have long been a
fan of the books that Twisted spoon press bring out not only as works
of literature charting the world of Czech lit but also they have
always made their books eye-catching and desirable to own. So this
their last is no different it is the last novel by the Czech writer
Zuzana Brabcova a writer who had worked as a cleaner, librarian and
hospital attendant before the regime fell in 1989 she worked briefly
in the government set up b Vaclav Havel who death is actually a
starting point in this book. She also worked as an editor she
publishes five novels this was her last novel and the book won the
Skvorceky prize for it.
The hairs of the
moment bristled
and it crouched and
barked. In the chambers of Deputies, four communist MPS refused to
honor the memory of the first Czech president, spearhheaded by the
leader of the Prague communists, Marta Semelova, who instead
congratulated tje nationon ridding itself of a pest
Marta Semelova used
to be Alice’s first grade teacher.”Your daughter is extremely
gifted, she’ll make something of herself one day”she said and
covered Alice’s head with her palm like a fortune-teller.
Can the prophetic
gesture of a communist even mean anything ? A bark, bristled hair , a
pointed sneer ? no it meant absolutely nothing
What might have been
for Alice when her teacher was Marta ?
The book is one of
those which I love as it has a real fragment nature to it we follow a
female Beta as she wanders around the modern and different Prague it
opens with a diary entry that states that Havel has died the day
before as the fragment build we see a woman on the edge of this city
in so many ways as she has no life and is one of those trying to find
work and kill time and this is what is her world the vision of the
city her life but also the life of her other female relations are
touched on her daughter a dreamlike a child that may be in a way is
her hope at times and despair at others a sister also on the edge
reduce to scavenging to get by and a mother that has maybe gone the
way her two daughters will eventually to the pits of despair in
depression and trying to find a way out her life. Another female
that recurs is Semelova she was Alice teacher and now a politician to
me this is a clever mirroring of the two people Beta and Marta
Semelova lives in this post-communist Prague one has risen the other
has fallen but also we see the darker side of the city the outskirts
the tourist never see she captures in the bums homeless and chav like
kids of the city.
January 27, 2015
Seventy years ago,
the red army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp where Nazis
had murdered over one million people : 960,000 Jews, 75,00 Poles,
21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviets pows, 15,000 Czechs, Slovaks, Germans,
Austrians,Ukrainians,French,Yugoslavians.In April 1947, Rudolf Hoss,
the commandant of the liberated camp, was sentenced to death amd
hanged symbolically in front of the crematorium of Auschwitz 1.
Don’t miss out! A
tour of Auschwitz, a two day trip for two, 46% off
The book has facts
like these scattered through this one got me with the last line so
apt for the modern world !!
This is one of those
books that is like a jigsaw we need to be patient as the piece are
all mixed up but as you get into the work it starts to build up and
the picture is built that of a city where dreams have been broken
and made were the communist ideals have been replaced even Havel
dream of post-communist Czech has fallen apart. The brilliance is in
the prose that captures both the everyday working of Beta life but
also the dream or nightmare way she envisions the world around her as
surreal and hyper-real at over time maybe even both at the same time.
I was reminded of the grotesque films of Jiri Barta his strange stop
motion films like the club of the laid off although set much earlier
has the same impending doom as this book has. A fitting tribute a
book that deals with both the plight of females and the mental health
issues that can cause in modern Czech society from a writer that
always addressed feminist issues in her works. -
https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/aviaries-by-zuzana-brabcova/
In his “Preface”
to ‘L’Assommoir’ Émile Zola claimed the novel “is a work of
truth, the first novel about the common people that does not lie and
that smells of the common people. And readers should not conclude
that the common people as a whole are bad, for my characters are not
bad, they are only ignorant and ruined by the conditions of sweated
toil and poverty in which they live.”
The protagonist
narrator of Zuzana Brabcová’s last novel, ‘Aviaries’, Alžběta
is a common person, and is linked inextricably to Émile Zola’s
‘L’Assommoir’;
Underneath the
mattress
The trap snapped
shut and firmly clamped around my memory. On February 18,1961, my mom
had wedged a book underneath my mattress to make sure I’d be
sleeping on a flat surface. She forgot about it. Hanging from a long
string, a monkey-shaped rattle quivered above me, and I didn’t take
my eyes off it for a single moment. They say the blind live in time,
not space. If that’s true, I was a blind person back then. All of
Grandpa’s clocks ticked away within my veins, and in my left
hemisphere, my grandma diced apples from the garden for strudel.
Mom’s friend later
took the crib for her own child. She discovered the forgotten book
underneath the mattress. It was Zola’s L’Assommoir. (p69)
Whilst Zola’s
“project is indebted to the Positivist philosopher’s isolation of
three principal determinants on human behavior: heredity,
environment, and the historical moment”, Zuzana Brabcová’s novel
adds in the influence of literature, literally sleeping on a book,
which can determine behavior and in this case fate.
‘Aviaries’ is a
collection of fragments, labelled from December 20, 2011 to February
19, 2015, however they are not simply diary entries, there are
recollections, newspaper headlines, interior monologues, dreams,
excerpts from prose, poetry and psalms (including a passage from C.G.
Jung’s essay on the “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore”
from 1951 and Oliver Sack’s “An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995).
This is a work full of contradictions, that move the reader in
contradictory directions, from anger to empathy within a paragraph.
It is not unusual for a sentence to spin off in a tangent. All adding
to the fragmentary nature of the book;
This frightens me:
what if disintegration into prime elements, the fragmentation into
particulars, is also true for other phenomena, and reality will churn
before my eyes in an incomprehensible muddle? (p78)
Our narrator is from
the fringes, being treated for mental illness, recently made
redundant with no prospect of reemployment – although she tries –
she spends her days emailing her dumpster diving daughter – who is
going out with Bob Dylan – and sharing her time and space with a
homeless alcoholic who has had “a tumor the size if a lemon removed
from his brain”, a soul mate, Melda, who she met in the
neurological ward of the local hospital.
“I have no money,”
I said to keep the conversation going. “I have no money, no job, no
family. Apart from Alice, that is, who’s found lifelong lover in
the flap of a discarded wallet in a dumpster, and my sister, Nadia,
whose sets all burned down.”
And suddenly, with
no warning, Doctor Gnuj quite unexpectedly fixed on me his brown-pink
gaze, matching the waiting room, the gaze of a polyp: “Your inner
world is like that basement lair of yours. Kick down the doors, file
through the bars! Do you even notice the world around you?”
I do. Don’t you
worry. I know well enough what the world around me lives for: the
season of wine tastings and exhibitions of corpses. (pgs 31-32)
A deeply moving work
of social exclusion, it is akin to William Kennedy’s ‘Ironweed’
on magic mushrooms, a melancholic work where we wonder if there is to
be any redemption for the narrator as she slips further and further
into decline.
Most of the
fragments are at the most two pages long and this broken collection
of seemingly disparate parts is well suited to exploring a life on
the edges, where the kaleidoscopic motes blur the lines between
fantasy and reality. As the publisher’s notes say “to testify to
what it is like to be alone and lost and indignant in a world that
has stopped making sense.”
And suddenly I
recall how my mom took me to see a psychologist once, I was twelve or
thirteen and maybe ever weirder back then than I am now, I don’t
really remember, even memory is just a play of colors and shapes
behind eyelids shut in a desire for non-existence. He showed me some
pictures, ink blots symmetrical along a vertical axis running through
the center of the card. Did it remind me of anything? Was I supposed
to let my imagination run wild? What swaddled dimensions, what
unknowable universes existed back then, just like today, between my
mental images and the words I was forced to use to express them?
Indeed: the infamous
Rorschach test.
“A blot,” I told
the psychologist when he showed me the first card, but I imagined
horse shit on a forest path, which was very strange, given the path
was so narrow, no horse could possibly squeeze its way down it.
“Okay, but what
does the blot remind you of?”
“A blot.”
“And this
picture?”
“A blot. A blot. A
blot.”
It reminded me of
the noble profile of Old Shatterhand’s face, it reminded me of a
human brain and a singed map of Prague, it reminded me of…But why
in the world should I tell him that? Just like today, I stubbornly
insisted on words quite different to those bursting inside me like
bubbles on the water’s surface.
Melda’s lying on a
foam mattress and drinking no euro-rotgut but the good Chilean wine
he’d given me for my birthday. He drinks it all in one go, being an
alcoholic. And me? A blot. Behind the closed eyelids of God knows
who. Blots. (p52)
Zuzana Brabcová has
taken the three principal determinants on human behavior: heredity,
environment, and the historical moment, from Zola’s ‘L’Assommoir’,
set the tale in modern day Prague and blended these into an
experimental “morass of the bizarre and the grotesque”. At times
the protagonist Alžběta is referred to in the third person, others
the first, omniscient overlaid with monologue, this approach forcing
to reader to recoil, but then to embrace.
‘Aviaries’ was
the winner of the Josef Škvorecký Award, a Czech language award in
2016 for the best prose of the year, unfortunately Zuzana Brabcová
had died soon after completing this work. A social commentary on the
political state in Prague and the ill treatment of socially
disadvantaged people, this is a powerful and lingering book.
As Émile Zola says
(again) in his Preface to ‘L’Assommoir’; “ I wanted to depict
the inexorable downfall of a working-class family in the poisonous
atmosphere of our industrial suburbs. Intoxication and idleness lead
to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, to the
progressive neglect of decent feeling and ultimately to degradation
and death. It is simply morality in action.”
Whist Zola has a
simple linear narrative arc, a moral story of decline into squalor,
Zuzana Brabcová starts us deeply immersed in the mire, the opening
fragment at sunset;
December 20, 2011
It arrives around
four, five o’clock in the afternoon, hangs around until about
seven, and then at night it reigns. It’s been that way for years, I
don’t recall it ever having been any different. A day devoted to
staying in is the music of a melody nobody has ever played. And when
I do have to go out, there’s a bloom coating the people I pass, a
frost blurring their features. I can imagine they don’t exist, and
in this way I love them. All that exists: just disrupts and mars, as
if somebody had graffiti-tagged The Night Watch.
Václav Havel died
the day before yesterday. In his sleep, in the morning. So its reign
extends beyond the night.
The book starting
the in the days after the first President of the Czech Republic’s
death. Even the reference to Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’
pervades the opening with darkness, will there be an escape from the
gloom?
Brabcová draws on a
number of Zola references;
and she looked along
the outer boulevards, to the left and to the right, her eyes pausing
at either end, filled with a nameless dread, as if, from now on, her
life would be lived out within this space, bounded by a
slaughterhouse and a hospital. (‘L’Assommoir’ p33)
No, I really can’t
complain about where I live. I have a complete range of public
facilities nearby: two hospitals, numerous pharmacies, a cemetery,
even a crematorium. (‘Aviaries’)
A highlight of my
recent reading journey and yet again a great publication from Twisted
Spoon Press in Prague. Now I have read Zuzana Brabcová’s final
novel I am eagerly awaiting more of her work to appear in English,
‘Rok Perel’ apparently the first Czech novel to deal with lesbian
love, set in a psychiatric hospital it deals with an adult woman’s
love for a young girl. Her first novel ‘Daleko od stromu’ was
published in 1984 in Cologne and Zuzana Brabcová was the first
recipient of the Jiří Orten Award in 1987, a prize established to
raise the profile of authors whose works had been rejected by the
regime. Her work ‘Stropy’ (‘Ceilings’) won the Magnesia
Litera in 2013, the title referring to the thing which people
hospitalised in psychiatric clinics see most often – a ceiling. All
of these blurbs (taken from the Czech Lit website), look most
appealing indeed, let’s hope some translators are on the case.
I think it is going
to take something special for this book not to remain at the top of
my highlights for 2019 and if you enjoy works that push the
boundaries, books that examine the fringes, mysterious, grotesque and
hallucinatory works then I suggest you order a copy of this post
haste. - Tony Messanger
https://messybooker.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/aviaries-zuzana-bracova-tr-tereza-novicka/
A sophisticated
testimony about social exclusion that oscillates between diary, dream
entries, and phantasmagorical prose.— Literární noviny
Aviaries has a
multifarious form, with the author alternating between short accounts
of real events and imaginative stories. There is here a precision of
expression pregnant with meaning, in which the core of matters
emerge: subtlety and sensibility. Exactly the type of quality
virtually taboo today. — MF Dnes
[Aviaries] puts us
in a public sphere that has no use for those who are incompatible
with the exigencies of the day, with the culture of youth, success,
physical prowess. Brabcová is a superb stylist, and with this short
book she has stepped beyond the wall of literary art that seldom
allows for this type of social commentary and analysis. — Respekt
