Balla, In the Name of the Father and Other
Stories, Trans. By Julia Sherwood and Peter
Sherwood. Jantar Publishing, 2017
An award-winning Slovak novella and three additional short stories. This collection, by an author described as "the Slovak Kafka", shares a unique dark humor, along with a commitment to satire and truth. The novella features a nameless narrator reflectin
Balla is often described as “the Slovak Kafka” for his depictions of the absurd and the mundane. In the Name of the Father features a nameless narrator reflecting on his life, looking for someone else to blame for his failed relationship with his parents and two sons, his serial adultery, the breakup of his marriage and his wife’s descent into madness. Against the backdrop of their stiflingly grey provincial lives, he completely fails to act against “the thing” growing in the cellar of the house he built with his brother. The book won numerous awards in Slovakia and in this edition is accompanied by three additional short stories, which share its unique dark humour, satire and truth.
LONG OVERSHADOWED by Czech literature, its partner from the former Czechoslovak republic, Slovak literature has rarely been available in translation, to say nothing of making an impact on international readers. Almost 25 years after Slovakia attained independence as a state, however, its writers are finally appearing on the global scene, with at least three new English translations, including a comprehensive contemporary anthology, published in the last few months alone. Of these, perhaps the most significant is In the Name of the Father, by the award-winning postmodernist Balla, which has just been released by the United Kingdom–based Jantar Publishing. Its translator, Julia Sherwood, who works in collaboration with her husband Peter, has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the recent emergence of Slovak literature from near-total obscurity. This beautifully produced volume, containing the title novella and three short stories, gives a useful introduction to a writer who epitomizes the generation that came of age during the period of post-communist transition. Jantar’s edition is enhanced by two critical pieces: a brief preface by the Hungarian writer Gábor Németh titled “How to Read Balla,” and a substantial (but not onerously theoretical) afterword by the Slovak scholar Marta Součková, which helps anchor Balla’s work in its Central European and national contexts.
Slovak critics have often compared Balla (who does not use his first name, Vladimír, in his literary work) to Kafka. While this seems to be the default comparison for much of Central European fiction, it is justified in Balla’s case not only by his absurdist edge but also by his bureaucratic career. Balla’s native town of Nové Zámky in southern Slovakia hardly seems a rival to Kafka’s mystical Prague, yet with its substantial Hungarian minority, it is one of the most ethnically diverse corners of the former Czechoslovakia. It has also produced some of the more interesting writers in contemporary Slovak literature, including Peter Macsovszky, who won the most recent Anasoft Litera prize, Slovakia’s leading literary award, for his novel Tantalópolis. Balla won the prize four years earlier, in 2012, for the novella In the Name of the Father (V mene otca), which epitomizes his particular form of Central European postmodernism. The self-enclosed nature of his texts, beginning with his first book of short stories, Leptokaria (1996), is heightened by his frequent use of intertextuality. He frequently uses autobiographical protagonists who are trapped in their existential isolation and unable to communicate with an absurd outside world, as reflected in the title of his second book, Outsiders (Outsideria, 1997). Along with Kafka, another point of reference may be Gabriel García Márquez, since the banality of his small-town setting sometimes gives way to bursts of what can only be described as magical realism. Yet his deconstruction of current reality reflects the specific experience of post-communist Central Europe, in which many long-standing assumptions were broken apart, including the elevated role of the writer in socialist societies.
The age of national revivals in the 19th century, which ironically used German philosophical models to break free of Austrian-Germanic cultural domination, gave Central and East European writers pride of place in their societies. Before the existence of independent states, national identity was rooted in language, which was naturally protected and nurtured by the writer, and this relationship is reflected in the number of streets, squares, and even towns named after literary figures across the region. This tradition was preserved, mutatis mutandis, during the communist period. One appeal of the socialist system, along with the financial rewards granted to those who supported it, was the idea of the writer as the “engineer of human souls,” still playing the nation-building role but now in the service of communist ideology. Many writers thus embraced the Soviet-dominated regimes that followed World War II, including the Stalinist excesses of the early 1950s. Even those who became disenchanted with communism (in the case of Czechoslovakia, especially after the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring reforms) served the nation through their dissident activity, opposing the regime that in some cases had richly rewarded them in the past and calling for a rapprochement with the West. But the lofty role of the writer, along with the moral compromises and risks it entailed, came tumbling down after the revolutions of 1989 that reopened the communist “Eastern Bloc” to the West. Without official state support and the shared excitement of smuggling hidden messages past the censors, literature lost much of its radical appeal (and readership) in post-socialist Central Europe. The generation of Slovak writers who came of age in the last decade of the 20th century, which includes Balla, was the first that could truly pursue “art for art’s sake,” free of political or social demands, but in an atmosphere of aggressive materialism, it remains an open question whether literature retains any role at all.
This loss of social significance found its symbolic expression in an obsession with sexual impotence, which became such a prevalent theme among young Slovak writers in the 1990s that the British doyen of Slovak studies, Robert Pynsent, ironically dubbed them the “Genitalists,” a group he characterized through their “ironization of male genitalia and an explicit concern in their fiction with modern Theory, especially French varieties.” While the Genitalist label was never fully embraced by Slovak critics, Rajendra Chitnis also employs it in his book Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe, which includes what is probably the best analysis of Balla available to the English reader. According to Chitnis, Balla’s Leptokaria “transforms sexual impotence from a condition of weakness into an ideal state for the writer, the endless promise of creation that is never fully realized.” Thus it is not surprising that in the opening scene of In the Name of the Father, the narrator (then 20) finds himself in a doctor’s office “with my tool hanging down and my balls in the doctor’s hands.” The examining physician orders him, “Don’t ever procreate because you will father a predator.” Much of the subsequent story describes the narrator’s dysfunctional relationship with his wife and his two sons, for which he takes little blame (“perhaps it’s my sons who are not suitable as sons”).
The ethnically mixed setting of Balla’s stories also reflects a historical issue whose ramifications continue into the present. As a nation with no independent kingdom in the past (unlike the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians), Slovaks faced the existential struggle of defining themselves against linguistic and political assimilation on several fronts. Under Hungarian rule, minority ethnicities faced increasing suppression as national consciousness grew stronger. After 1918, when the Czechoslovak republic was established, conflicts shifted from the Hungarians to the Czechs, who expected loyalty from the Slovaks and often looked with condescension at the smaller nation’s desire for autonomy, which was finally achieved under morally fraught circumstances. Hitler’s occupation of the Czech lands allowed for the creation of a Slovak puppet state, whose leader was executed for Nazi collaboration after the war, but whose long-repressed memory still inspires right-wing nationalists. In the postwar Eastern Bloc, these national tensions were superficially submerged beneath socialist brotherhood, only to reemerge after 1989, leading to the collapse of the Czecho-Slovak federation in 1993 and continuing conflicts with Hungary over language and citizenship issues. Thus, when Balla’s characters address each other in Hungarian at the beginning of the novella, these phrases (which Sherwood’s translation keeps in the original) both reflect a social reality and challenge the cultural assumption that it is a betrayal for Slovaks to write in any language other than Slovak.
Slovakia, then, is a complicated homeland — and the central metaphor of In the Name of the Father is the bizarre house built by the narrator’s brother, whose sprawling underground labyrinth represents not only the family but the nation. As the narrator observes, “This town’s inhabitants had nothing in common with any kind of nation.” Most of the characters speak a mix of Slovak and Hungarian, which adds to the general confusion and alienation. The mysterious tunnels built by the narrator’s brother are meant to help the citizens cope with their insignificance: they are designed to create a sacred energy “to induce a very specific mood that would make the town’s populace realise that there was no point expecting any major change […] they would remain second-rate citizens of the border region of a second-rate country.” It is typical of Balla’s fictional world that a character would expend superhuman efforts and create a mystical force just to remind people of their inherent mediocrity. After the family moves into the house, the narrator’s wife insists on keeping the curtains closed so that no one can see inside — as a result, everyone is forced to live in darkness. Later he finds her digging into the concrete in the basement, and she confesses that she has planted the seeds of Yggdrasil, the sacred tree of Nordic myth. One of the narrator’s only friends, Mr. Labadaj, comes to see the tree and offers his erudite advice: “As long as mankind is divided into two sexes, war and natural selection will rage between them […] followed by coupling, by procreation of the winners, that is to say the losers of the future.” This nihilistic view of human reproduction is followed by one of Balla’s autobiographical allusions. Labadaj asks the narrator if he has heard of Baldur, “the most beautiful, purest and youngest of the Germanic gods. It could easily be you, don’t you think? A vestige of the god’s name in your surname suggests this.” This ironic contrast between the spiteful narrator and the sublime god with a vaguely similar name points to Balla himself — particularly toward the end of the story, when the narrator reveals that his younger son has become a writer.
The translation published by Jantar includes three stories from Balla’s previous collections: “Before the Breakup” (2005), “Spring is Coming” (2008), and “Contagion,” from the 1996 Leptokaria. The last of these stories echoes the theme of an unhomely house, but with a focus on friendship rather than family. The narrator inherits a house from his parents, then throws away the furniture, but has a feeling of dread about staying there alone. He invites a passing friend to stay with him, despite the fact that their friendship has lost any positive value: “In fact, we hated each other, but come to think of it, is it really so strange for friends to hate each other?” They end up living together and spend their energy repeatedly redecorating and renovating the house. Yet the feeling that it is possessed by a mysterious contagion drives both the friend and, finally, the narrator to leave the city, and then to escape over the border. Another inexplicable threat appears in “Before the Breakup,” where a woman named Miša discovers something hiding behind the TV set while her husband Jano is away on an international business trip. Despite its underlying paranoia, this story has a somewhat lighter tone: when Miša’s friend suggests that she see a psychologist “for starters,” she responds indignantly: “It’s as big as a wardrobe and you’re calling this starters?” When Jano returns, he sees the threatening object too, but comments that “it made the living room even cozier than before.” Only later does Miša’s friend Soňa confirm that she and nearly everyone she knows has seen the same thing: “You’re no different from anyone else. How do you diagnose madness when everyone is mad?” The shortest of the stories, “Spring is Coming,” also features a female protagonist, who watches her husband drinking and thinks, “Who is this?” A mirror appears as a symbol for alienation; the character stares into it and asks the same question, answering herself: “Nobody.”
Balla’s fiction seems to offer little comfort to the reader, except for the grim pleasure of confronting reality in its true emptiness. Yet the author himself insists that his intention goes beyond the mere exploration of despair. In the new anthology Into the Spotlight (also translated by Julia Sherwood along with Magdalena Mullek), Balla comments: “I’ve been writing to appeal precisely to those people who share my strange perception of life, and this helps to create the kind of community that is able to survive in a world that feels quite alien to them.” It is in this search for meaning, hopeless though it may be, that Balla evokes the older, quasi-sacred role of the writer in society. However, his community is not that of traditional religion or the nation (Slovak, Hungarian, or otherwise), but one of outsiders, misfits, and lonely souls who are unable to identify with these or any other categories — a group, he suggests, that is much larger than we might think. - Charles Sabatos
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-slovak-kafka-on-ballas-in-the-name-of-the-father/
Balla (who uses only his surname) is not nicknamed “the Slovak Kafka” only on account of his steady job in an audit office and his pulmonary weakness. He loves the absurd and mysterious, is a master of magic realism and postmodernism, and, most importantly, is able “to express the unspeakable” with frankness unprecedented in Slovak literature. Julia and Peter Sherwood’s skilful translation of his best novel, In the Name of the Father and three other short stories skilfully conveys the forceful impact of his terse parables.
The title is a blasphemous pun: the father in question (who is the narrator) is a philanderer who puts pleasure before his children. Balla has admitted in an interview that this stomach-churning dissection of a family break-up is largely autobiographical. The narrator’s own father had preferred a horse to him and had lusted after his daughter-in-law. As a boy, the narrator had wished him dead; in adulthood, he challenges the obligation to love and live for his own sons, whose youth he envies. His ageing wife disgusts him: “Alienation? When were you close to the old hag I ask? Never. Because when you were close she didn’t look like this”. She, in turn, refuses to sleep with him, alternates between sullen silence and hysteria, demonizes him to the children – who hate him and find her nauseating – and finally descends into madness. The graphic scenes of her eventual physical decline are particularly harrowing. A mythical tree, Yggdrasil, harbouring evil spirits embodies the poisonous family relations and pervades the family dwelling.
In “Contagion” the protagonist’s own character traits infect his house, and no DIY, new furniture, change of residence or even emigration will help: he can’t escape from himself. In “Before the Breakup” marital discord takes the shape of an ominous presence that will eventually worm its way into every partnership. In “Spring Is Coming” a woman catches sight of her husband and is reminded of an albino spider.
Balla is equally sacrilegious about his homeland. He calls Slovakia “forever a second rate country” inhabited by “clans of alcoholic workers and peasants, or oafs”, who are interested only in money. In the author’s words, they “let others trample all over them, they endure any regime without muttering a word”. The system might have changed but Slovak people are as apathetic and unfree as ever. “It’s just their shitty slave mentality.”— Zuzana Slobodová
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-features/in-brief/slovak-fiction
“I loved this book. Bizarre and beautiful, intense and passionate, the writing is so fresh.”— Rosie Goldsmith
“Reading Balla is like getting on a roller coaster and behaving in an age-appropriate manner: you never know what’s coming, you scream and shout, now in fear, now in joy.”— Gábor Németh,
Balla, Dead. Trans. by David Short. Jantar
Publishing, 2023
61 or so ‘found’ acerbic short stories cataloguing the descent of human beings into murdering Jews, gaslighting, voting for European Nazis, or cutting up Arabs. Written with very dark humourous intent, the title ‘Dead’ is an acknowledgement from the author that the collection would kill his reputation as an inoffensive humourist gently satirising masculinity.
Dead is Balla's most recent book and marks a glorious return to the short story form. The stories are very topical dealing with the theme of masculinity, how that is expressed in different forms of aggressive nationalism, Slovak 'nativism' and delusional male interior monologues. There is also a commentary on the proliferation of US-style Christian extremism in Balla's satirical re-writing of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
The Slovak writer Balla is dead – at least according to the title of a collection of his short fiction recently published in English by Jantar in David Short’s translation. Perhaps he always was: a character in Big Love, a novella of 2015 translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood in 2019, claims that, in Slovakia, “writers don’t exist any more”. Balla’s many publications – since his first volume of stories emerged in 1996, he has produced twelve books, two of them since Dead originally appeared in Slovak in 2018 – suggest, however, that reports of the author’s death are greatly exaggerated. These antic, angry, tricksy, inventive books demonstrate key signs of life.
Balla has much to say about having nothing to say. These are stories in search of a plot, generating their energies from frustration at the lack of an adequate subject or purpose, either for living or writing. The title of Big Love promises a transcendent ideal, something for which one might sacrifice oneself. But, while the book follows the course of a romantic relationship between its protagonist, a writer called Andrič, and his girlfriend Laura, it is a story of uncommitment: Andrič is half-hearted and inattentive, and their affair ends undramatically. Laura takes up with someone who doesn’t write, and is therefore capable of action.
The story of Andrič and Laura stands as an inadequate proxy for narrative drive – whether in the form of romance or, as a drunken nationalist tells Andrič in a bar, love of country: “what would be best of all is if everyone loved the Slovaks. That’s what I call big love”. But Balla’s protagonists refuse such mystifications. They are often paranoid. Opening scenes frequently find the protagonist undergoing medical examination, hoping for a diagnosis of their general malaise. In the first chapter of Big Love, Andrič complains to a doctor that “they” are remotely controlling him. The doctor responds: “You say you’re being manipulated but in fact you’re just dying to be manipulated”. Paranoia is a desire for importance: persecution – the fate of many writers in the communist period – at least suggests you mean something. Later, neglecting Laura, “Andrič was sitting in the hotel room in front of his laptop, hoping that he had a secret mission in this world”. Balla’s characters await an annunciation; in the meantime, “the stagecoach of the plot trundle[s] on”. A story in Dead, - Kathryn Murphy
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/fiction/dead-big-love-balla-book-review-kathryn-murphy
Sherwood. Jantar Publishing, 2019
The narrator has been with his partner for a long time now but it isn't clear what they see in each other.
'Balla (as an author he dispenses with his first name, Vladimír) is a more established writer in Slovakia. Perhaps because he holds on to a mundane office job while writing stories about lost male souls, he is often referred to as the Slovak Kafka. (In fact the most Kafkaesque of the two works reviewed here is Bellevue, in which Blanka in her madness sees a beetle on the wall and thinks, ‘is it you, Gregor?’) Andrič, the unheroic protagonist of Big Love, which is more a novella than a novel, is unhappy playing happy families for short periods with his very normal girlfriend, Laura, her daughter and her irritatingly trendy mother; he is equally unhappy with his mediocre beer-drinking colleagues. He takes no action to resolve this state of affairs, merely provoking Laura into putting her foot down. Resentful, argumentative and self-centred, Andrič evokes none of the sympathy that Kafka’s victims of family, fate and bureaucracy arouse. But he is witty in his observations. Many of the short chapters could easily be refashioned into five-minute scripts for stand-up comics. Why the novella is called Big Love is unclear: the Slovaks’ ‘Big Love’ has traditionally been for their country, which they have for centuries seen as an island of religious conviction and Slavic values, fighting against power-crazed Germans and maniacal Hungarians. Certainly this ‘Big Love’ has nothing erotic or interpersonal about it.What makes Big Love significant is the clarity of Balla’s writing and the eloquence with which the protagonist damns and belittles himself. But the key role in making Balla’s – and Dobrakovová’s – fiction so readable for a British audience is played by the translators, Julia and Peter Sherwood. With their linguistic skills and perfect pitch, they have done as much for the international reputation of Slovak prose as any single Slovak writer.'- from Donald Rayfield's review in Literary Review
'I do worry about the people who like my writing' Becasue there's usually something wrong with them. Then again, I can't imagine life being even slightly agreeable without people who have something wrong with them' - Balla on Big Love
'Big Love is primarily a critique of contemporary society, in which the triumph of liberal democracy has increased rather than diminished the Kafkaesque aspects of life' - Charles Sabatos (from his introduction)
Slovakia is clinically depressed.
Or so I must infer, judging from Balla’s novel Big Love, first published in Slovakia in 2015 and now available in English (thanks again to the tireless efforts of the Sherwoods). Consider this brief excerpt:
“He was burnt out.
“But how could he find a job, burnt out as he was?
“And what for?
“He had a full-time job with himself, he was preoccupied with getting through the basic functions necessary to live.
“He got out of bed but went on sleeping.
“He was permanently asleep or half asleep—unawakened, unawakened, unawakened—and as he kept turning this phrase over in his head he gave a sudden start and realized he had fallen asleep on the office toilet.” (p. 103)
That’s pretty much a textbook description of clinical depression; it’s also the novel’s plot, insofar as it has one at all. The “protagonist” Andrič sleepwalks through life, aimlessly and pointlessly. He is possessed by the dreary inability to believe in anything, be convinced of anything, or commit to anything, even to his own hedonistic self-interest.
As such, Andrič misses out on the good and rewarding relationship right in front of him with Laura. The problem is their metaphysical mismatch: she is pointed up, and he is pointed down. We can give Andrič credit, at least, for not dragging her down with him, a common enough strategy among the chronically failing-to-thrive. But nothing Laura can do, and for that matter nothing that Andrič can do, will change his direction. You can’t talk someone out of depression.
I wish I could talk Balla out of writing novels about depression or, to put it more precisely, novels that in themselves body forth depression. His previous work published in English, In the Name of the Father, moves through much the same depressive fog. There as here in Big Love, the transition from communism to capitalism has proven not to be a panacea after all. It’s easy (and appropriate) to blame a good deal of this on the crony capitalism and fake democracy that in fact came to dominate post-1989 (Czecho-)Slovakia. But it’s also due to the fact that success in capitalism requires something more than depressive fog and incapacitated mediocrity. So, what if people just don’t have it in them to do better?
The reason I wish Balla (a bureaucrat at his day job, as it turns out) could do better than narrate depression, though, is because he is such a perceptive illustrator of the world as he finds it. The interest in this short novel is not its plot nor in its characters, who function more like types. No, the selling point of the book is the various characters’ monologues: a jumble of bizarre conspiracy theories, distorted historical and scientific facts, and almost accidental insights into the mental and political illness infecting their society. (See particularly the ones on pp. 21–22, 39–41, 48–49, 50, 63–64, and 92–94.)
Two monologues in particular stand out. One illuminates the internalized totalitarianism that even thirty years of more-or-less freedom has not managed to overcome but only to relocate:
“An experienced bureaucrat won’t let himself be deprived of totalitarianism so easily and carries it with him wherever he goes, never stating anything openly and with no opinions of his own, convinced that you must be scared in a very sophisticated way, whereas in the old days you could be scared openly and ‘officially’, so to speak, fear was something that was officially accepted, sanctioned and went without saying, in the previous regime it would have been odd not to be scared, as even the officials at the very top were scared and they were in the best position to know that fear was justified because scheming was rampant, especially among those at the very top and indeed directed chiefly at those at the very top—the experienced Panza knows very well to what extent you had to be scared and how important it was to let your superiors know that you actually were scared—not in so many words, but in a covert, yet unambiguous way, while at the same time he imagined—and he wasn’t the only one to imagine this in those days—that anyone might be his superior, including any passer-by in the street, you never know, he used to imagine, and treated every passer-by as his superior, just as he later begin to treat as his superior every statue ideologically and theologically linked to Jesus on the cross, because after the fall of the totalitarian regime Panza automatically embraced another totalitarianism in the form of the Catholic Church, which is hardly surprising since in most people’s minds totalitarianism is linked not only to fear but also to boundless hope and trust and the certainty that everything is, and will be, fine for evermore, totalitarian power not only metes out punishment but it also protects, and maintains the untenable, and so Panza genuflects before the chapels of the Holiest of Holy Trinities as well as the most garish, baroquely bloated sculptures and statues of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, he crosses himself by the book, doffs his cap and bows his head, there is something studiedly slavish about this, it is normal, totalitarian behavior, a cultural veneer; in other words, genuine subjugation.” (pp. 61–62)
The other example I’ll give here is, with no small irony, an indictment of Slovak literature altogether, placed on the lips of Laura’s mother, though a reader can’t help but wonder whether it expresses Balla’s own thoughts, Balla’s own despair, or the afflicting judgments of others on Balla:
“And as for Slovak writers… they all lack patience and perseverance… In fact, they lack everything a good writer should possess… but above all, they lack experience. Experience with women, apart from anything else. Mind you, I'm not talking only about male writers but also about female writers because they, too, lack experience with women, they don’t know any real women. Reality—that’s the tragedy. They don’t know women and how they behave in tragic circumstances. They don't know women as tragedies. I used to teach a class on Slovak writers in grammar school. I don’t know if anyone still does that these days. Do they? I could no longer bring myself to convince anyone that they should know something about Slovak writers. Not that we could justify such a need in the old days either, but back then we didn’t need to justify the things. Eventually I became so disgusted with Slovak writers that I switched to teaching Russian literature. I wanted to keep away from Slovak misfits. I want to keep far away from them, I really do. Fortunately, writers don’t exist anymore. Because to exist is to mean something. But they don’t mean anything. We should erase them from our diaries, we should stop phoning them on their name day. They are nobodies. Yet these nobodies haven’t even noticed. After November 1989, the Slovak peasants noticed immediately from that moment on they were nobodies. But the writers didn’t notice anything… You realize that there’s something wrong with books, that it’s unnatural to cram one’s flat and life full of books. Go ahead, help yourself to as many of these fat tomes as you like! Including those with dedications by Slovak writers. We used to think their signatures would be worth something one day. It never happened.” (pp. 79–80)
It’s an odd thing: under the old system, attempting to speak the truth could get you imprisoned or killed, but that itself told you how worthwhile the effort was. Now you are just another thinly piping voice in a vast marketplace; your chances of competing successfully enough even to be noticed, much less be paid, is virtually nil; and nobody cares about your work enough to vilify you—only to ignore you. Let’s admit the depression is not without cause.
Still, despite the fog, the whistle in the dark that this novel represents seems to want better. Even a half-hearted critique is light years away from total capitulation. Once again on the lips of Laura’s mother we hear the devastating observation that people in Slovakia want only “torpor and hibernation” (79). Isn’t the very act of saying so an attempt to rouse them to something better? - Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
https://www.sarahhinlickywilson.com/blog/2020/7/21/slovak-novels-in-english-29-big-love
No nation in Europe today is as good at self-deprecation as the Slovaks: they claim to be victims of modern kleptocracy, helplessly in thrall to psychotherapy, alcohol, European mercantilism and a depraved pop culture. Until thirty years ago, a typical Slovak novel had a wise beekeeper and a virtuous matriarch as its heroes, their values surviving both wartime fascism and postwar communism. But even before the end of communist rule, existential despair was breaking through – notably in the very fine novels of Ján Johanides, unfortunately still untranslated, and in the iconoclastic novellas of the cynical and sexually obsessed Peter Pišt’anek, who died in 2015. Slovak writers of the present generation are as cosmopolitan as they are Slovak. They tend to be familiar with the main languages of western Europe; formerly yoked into a single country with the Czechs, they have shaken off their inferiority complex, together with Czech lugubriousness. Rather like the Scots in respect to the English, their literature cocks an anarchic snook at their former Czech masters.
...Balla (as an author he dispenses with his first name, Vladimír) is a more established writer in Slovakia. Perhaps because he holds on to a mundane office job while writing stories about lost male souls, he is often referred to as the Slovak Kafka. (In fact the most Kafkaesque of the two works reviewed here is Bellevue, in which Blanka in her madness sees a beetle on the wall and thinks, ‘is it you, Gregor?’) Andrič, the unheroic protagonist of Big Love, which is more a novella than a novel, is unhappy playing happy families for short periods with his very normal girlfriend, Laura, her daughter and her irritatingly trendy mother; he is equally unhappy with his mediocre beer-drinking colleagues. He takes no action to resolve this state of affairs, merely provoking Laura into putting her foot down. Resentful, argumentative and self-centred, Andrič evokes none of the sympathy that Kafka’s victims of family, fate and bureaucracy arouse. But he is witty in his observations. Many of the short chapters could easily be refashioned into five-minute scripts for stand-up comics. Why the novella is called Big Love is unclear: the Slovaks’ ‘Big Love’ has traditionally been for their country, which they have for centuries seen as an island of religious conviction and Slavic values, fighting against power-crazed Germans and maniacal Hungarians. Certainly this ‘Big Love’ has nothing erotic or interpersonal about it.
What makes Big Love significant is the clarity of Balla’s writing and the eloquence with which the protagonist damns and belittles himself. But the key role in making Balla’s – and Dobrakovová’s – fiction so readable for a British audience is played by the translators, Julia and Peter Sherwood. With their linguistic skills and perfect pitch, they have done as much for the international reputation of Slovak prose as any single Slovak writer. - Donald Rayfield
Though Balla, one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary novelists, has been compared to Kafka, he might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret (Israeli author of The Nimrod Flipout and multiple other collections of surreal short stories), given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work. This is certainly the case for Big Love, an autobiographical novel chronicling the deterioration of the relationship between alcoholic Andrič and single mother Laura.
While the Kafka comparison misses the mark (Kafka’s preoccupations are more metaphysical than Balla’s), Balla is the inheritor of a distinctly Central/Eastern European style, characterised by a sort of black humor that tightropes between age-old superstition and the ominous State. Take the scene in which two middle-aged men visit their friend in the hospital: ‘The other two dash towards the staircase, faces screwed up with hatred. As if possessed by the devil. This is just a turn of phrase, because in fact the devil has always been inside them’. If the narrative does not follow a necessarily clear chain of cause and effect, this is always compensated for through humour: ‘My neighbour got the point and has since started chemotherapy and pre-op tests though he has yet to be diagnosed with any illness’. A personal trademark, this darkly ironic style of Balla’s is reminiscent of is often seen in Eastern European literature. Slovak literature is only now being properly translated into English to coincide with the state’s celebrating twenty-five years of independence.
Beyond its apparent cynicism and humour, there is a degree of poignancy to this book – for instance, the touching description of Andrič’s grandmother, dressed in dark colours (as is traditional for older women in rural Eastern Europe): ‘She reminded him of a crow but he loved her very much, despite a hate campaign waged by his mother’. As an ensemble, one feels compassion for both Andrič, who is extremely depressed and part of a brutalised society, and for Laura, a woman trying to find a man willing to be a father for her child. The sense of futility that accompanies the inevitable breakdown of the mismatch is highly realistic, despite the narration being at times pompous (‘Their value on the vast market place of bodies was depreciating’). Indeed the tone of the novel is ambiguous, self-ironising and difficult guage. Long monologues, too, tend to be excessively expository, while elsewhere dialogue sparkles with wit. Balla has a knack for wonderfully specific characters, with Andrič’s friend Panza being the most ludicrous of all: ‘He’s had bad experiences in the past when he used to listen and got nothing in return, so now he professionally and routinely doesn’t listen’.
As Andrič’s relationship with Laura unravels, so does the narrative, though a clearly discernible plot is evidently not the author’s priority, while philosophical meanderings on contemporary life are. This is somewhat unsatisfying for the reader, but, in fairness, harmonious with Andric’s own passivity, and thus clever as a tool of construction. This plotlessness, however cinematic, is compensated for through tone and its barren yet particular atmosphere.
Julia and Peter Sherwood do excellent work in co-translation (the presence of two different voices is non-existent), and evidently take pleasure in the text’s many ridiculous and amusing moments, as the spunk of the English version shows: the future, for example, is described somewhat presciently as ‘a total storm of dickheadedness’.
Despite being ornamented by a sardonic sort of pessimism, the message of Big Love is quite simple and sadly relatable when it comes down to it: ‘Hatred engulfed him like an incurable illness’. Paranoia and displacement, as well as fear for the future, might have seemed more natural sentiments to feel in Eastern Europe thirty years ago, but today, the ailment strikes one as generational rather than the result of belonging to a certain part of a world or living in the aftermath of an oppressive political regime.
While Big Love is written from a male perspective, Ursula Kovalyk’s short story collection turns the tables by being composed almost exclusively of female narrators and protagonists. Flipping through the contents of The Night Circus and Other Stories, one is surprised by the number of texts included in such a slim volume – 16 stories in less than 100 pages. Yet the impression that remains in one’s mind after closing the book is quite clear and homogenous: it is a work about the female body, one’s connection to it or alienation from it.
In ‘The Predator’, a bombshell of a woman proves to be more than meets the eye as a conversation with a friendship reveals a dysfunctional marriage, while in ‘Julia’ the eponymous character playacts at a normal marriage throughout a spiritually empty sexual encounter. A generally cynical view of marriage is pervasive; for instance, ‘The Bathroom’: ‘Her life was identical to those of many women her age, women whose youth had been spent under the shadow of the Iron Curtain and who had wasted their prime in queues for bananas. It was a life without ups or downs, without passion or direction, without emotional outbursts or love affairs’. Leaving aside the inescapable flatness this condemns the character to (not to mention its implausibility), this story is characterised by the precise sensorial detail of the surrounding environment that permeates the entire collection: ‘The bathroom was again glowing green, exuding a magical light like a lamp that attracts moths. The light mingled with the shrieking of monkeys, the screeching birds and the drumming of water as it dripped onto the leaves’.
A metaphor of boiling water resurfaces again and again in the narrative as tensions rise, and at times the exactitude of description is striking: ‘There’s a strict inspector sitting inside of me. If she catches me not working hard enough she transmits harsh, reproachful signals to my brain’ (‘Go Slow Therapy’). The aspects of female identity in discussion – such as daughterhood, to name one – are broached with bravery (microscopic attention is given to the body of a dying mother as she agonizingly draws her last breath), and often makes for a discomforting read. The author’s main preoccupation seems to be with the aging body, and multiple stories are dedicated to this subject. Often, one often gets the impression that there is more to be unpacked than we are given: women rarely reach their full psychological potential, and literally go up in smoke. This elusiveness deserves the benefit of the doubt, as the texts are indeed very short. On the other hand, the intense or fantastical nature of the plot sometimes fails to compensate for the lack of subtlety ailing most characters. It is in the author’s position as an inheritor of magic realism that the work’s shortcomings become apparent: sometimes, characters are stereotypical and excessively similar to each other; old ladies are excessively quirky and husbands are superficially boorish. Dialogue, as a result, is somewhat insipid.
These concerns of subtlety are, however, only an afterthought. Kovalyk is striking in the boldness of her imagination: we encounter cute and creepy dwarves, dream sequences, overripe trees, trippy paintings. There is much representational work at play that deserves applause, precisely for its artistic intention. Women see things that are not there: the author plays with the painterly ‘trompe l’œil’ effect, turning the concept of ‘gaslighting’ on its head, while a physically tiny man becomes a metaphor for the dangers of masculinity misunderstood. Disturbing intensity nearly always lies beneath the surface. Strands remain loose, and leave questions in their wake: how connected are we to our bodies?
Sometimes impressionistic and fantastical, sometimes naturalistic, Kovalyk’s The Night Circus, although not necessarily a virtuosic collection, offers an interesting and – often chimeric – examination of the representations of female identity. - Andreea Scridon
Big Love by the self-deprecating and humorously misanthropic Slovak writer, Balla, is an anti-love love story in which the hapless protagonist fumbles around in the dark, imagining he knows what love is while perhaps the best relationship he will ever have slips from his clumsy grasp. This short novella is not only a sharp witted critique of contemporary post-socialist society in Slovakia, in the form of a fondly satirical take on its bureaucratic ineptness and literary pretensions, but it is also an endearing and all too recognizable romantic comedy of the kind that actually exists in real life more often than in the movies.
Our hero, Andrič, as is typical for Balla, is a thinly veiled version of the author himself—a writer at heart but a bureaucrat by day. Not unlike another absurdist author from the other side of what is now, once again, the Czech-Slovak divide. And like Kafka, his protagonists tend to exist in isolation, unable to communicate with or understand the world around them. In this case Andrič is trapped in such a strangely off base circle of reasoning about human nature and his own place within it that he routinely and consistently misconstrues his unnecessarily patient girlfriend’s cues until, of course, it is finally too late.
The first time Andrič sees Laura she is wearing a neck brace. She has been injured in a car accident. A strange impetuous for a budding attraction. A single mother with a young daughter, Laura seems to be everything he is not. She is boisterous, outgoing, physically active, responsible and capable of looking after herself and her child, even if it means being creative in seeking out opportunities and resources. It’s hard to imagine what she sees in Andrič. But somehow their relationship, albeit a long distance one, manages to survive for two years. She is, however, one of the least developed characters in the book, a function of how limited Andrič understanding of her truly is.
The supporting cast, if you like, is wonderful. In fact, it is these two unlikely, eccentric characters, who play well against the two aspects of Andrič’s life, the professional and the literary, and serve to challenge his limitations while furthering the overall satirical intent of the novel as a whole. Panza is his office mate and best friend. Unmarried, he lives with his sister, a fact that inspires a healthy amount of curiosity around the office. Even more than Andrič, he exists in isolation, formed and informed by his long bureaucratic career which has left him vacillating between paranoia and despondency. He exhibits a practiced form of engagement with the world that reflects his rejection of ordinary human interaction:
Panza is sitting, listening to Andrič and nodding, or rather, he’s not listening, only nodding, his eyes and his whole face make it clear that he doesn’t understand, and how could he, since he’s not listening, it’s not that he is stupid, he just can’t be bothered to listen, he’s had bad experiences in the past when he used to listen and got nothing in return, so now he professionally and routinely doesn’t listen, especially when a sentence begins in a complicated way.
Because how could such a sentence possibly end?
Panza, whose tendency to express panic about the state of affairs within the system to which he has dedicated his career and within which he should long been disavowed of any ideals or illusions of freedom promised by the collapse of Communism, fuels the younger Andrič’s own fears. And fascination. Together they are a misfit pair, with Panza consuming more of Andrič’s attentions than Laura even if it is, again, difficult to figure out if their bond is more than circumstantial, because they never seem to enjoy each other’s company. Or perhaps these are two men for whom enjoy and company are not natural counterparts.
By contrast, Laura’s mother Elvira, is a former school teacher with an apartment filled with books and a string of former husbands, one for any necessary anecdote or discussion point. An ethereal being who almost floats around the jumbled space she shares with her daughter and granddaughter, her disaffection with contemporary society comes from a different angle than Panza’s. Reading and everything associated with it seems, so far as Andrič can tell, to be the source of her particular melancholy, her “sadness beyond words.” She views her nation as a country of sleepwalkers, dulled into a state of semi-consciousness—a state which has extended to Slovak writers. She is especially harsh on them claiming they all, even the female writers, lack experience with women. Without experience, how can anyone write? But, as she says:
Fortunately, writers don’t exist anymore. Because to exist is to mean something. But they don’t mean anything. We should erase them from our diaries, we should stop phoning them on their name day. They are nobodies. Yet these nobodies haven’t even noticed.
As a writer himself, Andrič makes the mistake of equating his ability to create with some measure of accomplishment in his personal life, no matter how obvious the messages Laura is signalling should be. Over and over he fails to see that what he imagines is, at last, “big love”with Laura, is rapidly losing its hold on her. We only have the briefest glance into her side of the equation and she comes across as unconvinced of her love forAndrič as we are. Once she slips away, he is left to slowly realize that big love is sometimes measured by the space left in your heart and life once someone is gone. And, of course, by then it is too late. But even then, he salvages a perverse pleasure that he somehow found the words, although he cannot remember uttering them, that finally severed their relationship for good:
After Laura informed him about the termination of their relationship Andrič gradually began to swell up with a kind of absurd pride about the fact that he, too, was capable of using words, that his words had consequences – and this also applied to statements he couldn’t remember at all – but Laura refused to repeat those words of great significance and merely reminded him that he had uttered them in a wine cellar in Spišská Sobota.
Who else but Andrič would follow such reasoning?
For such a short book, Big Love offers a lot through the somewhat thick lens of its hapless protagonist. It is relentless in its critique of society, family, love and literature. Many of the references are specific to Slovak history and culture, but a lack of familiarity with the underlying intertextual content will not impair the enjoyment of this funny/tragic tale. Andrič, for all his tendency to overthink the emotions out of any reasonable situation is endearing, the humour is bitter, sarcastic and wise. Yet, as the ending nears, his own existential crisis deepens, lending more credence to that well-worn Kafka comparison. - Joseph Schreiber
https://roughghosts.com/2019/10/26/writing-ones-self-out-of-romance-ballas-big-love/
Balla’s Big Love is a short novel about the stress of living under capitalism. Apparently an autobiographical work (according to the introduction, but one should always take such declarations with a pinch of salt), Balla’s protagonist Andric lives in a dispassionate relationship with his girlfriend Laura and has a mundane job as a minor civil servant, where he argues with his clients about whether they are clients, and spends a lot of time thinking about his own life. One might see it as the hipster parody of the ‘middle-aged man contemplating adultery’ trope, but there is more going on than that.
One of the recurring threads is the anxiety caused by living in a modern liberal democracy – the punishment for societal and social failures is different from that experienced under communism, but is no less damaging. What Andric and his friends experience is ‘preventative fear’ – the constant anxiety of anticipating failure, in anything from romantic relationships to customer-service experiences, from how hard should you work at your job to how should you open a car door. In all these things there is an expectation of rules, yet no one knows what they are. Balla’s novel hovers between an ironic commentary on such difficulties, and an honest exposé of the behavioural dysfunctionalities caused by living under capitalism.
Andric is a no-longer young man failing to succeed in adulthood according to all the usual criteria (which he himself provides); but it is also clear that this is not something that troubles him very much; however, he does worry about whether it should. He is more concerned with observing himself in the process of failure than he is worried about failing. The question that seems to underlie all his preoccupations, as well as all his resistances, is what would happen if he were to succeed in all the expected things – behaving like the right kind of boyfriend, the right kind of employee, or the right kind of participant in a liberal society. Would there be freedom; would there be ease?
I think we all know the answer to that. - Jennifer Sarha
https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-jennifer-sarha-reviews-big-love-by-balla/
Balla, Among the Ruins. Trans. By David Short,
Jantar Publishing, 2024
Balla’s most recent book, Among the Ruins, shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera Prize in 2021, consists of fragments of newspaper reports, TV news items, conversations, letters, voice messages, and police reports related to a fragile middle-aged woman, Vargová, and her drug and alcohol dependent therapist, Dr. Felešlegi. It is a thought-provoking, often funny portrait of human frailty, blurring the boundaries between sanity and insanity.
Balla (1967), who goes only by his surname, has been called “the Slovak Kafka”, “the chief alchemist of Slovak literature” and “the uncrowned king of Slovak outsiders and misfits”. He has published ten books, mostly short fiction and his works have been translated into English, German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovene and Serbian. The novella In the Name of the Father was voted Book of the Year by the Slovak daily SME in 2012 and in the same year awarded both the Tatrabanka Foundation Art Prize for Literature and Anasoft Litera Prize.
