Rivers of Babylon - Peter Pišťanek book review

The finest novel written in Slovakia ever, Peter Pišťanek's The Rivers of Babylon was first published to great acclaim in 1991. Inside its covers, the character Rácz was revealed as the archetypal post-Communist "East European gangster". This revelation came as quite a shock to those controlling the local foreign exchange trading in Bratislava and the goons operating further east. 

Rácz was drawn so closely from the competing Bratislava post-Communist "elites" that it became difficult differentiate "the real Rácz". Was he an ex-secret policeman, an ex-member of the Czechoslovak Politburo, an up-and-coming "Slovak Nationalist" politician or a real live rural ponce trying to make it as a post Soviet Prince Michael? He was all and none and more.

Despite making only a cameo appearance in the second volume of what later became a trilogy,"The Wooden Village" was first oublished in 1994. Pišťanek's readers delighted in further tales of the "wild east". Already familiar characters described their participation in Rácz's byznyz: hotels, drugs and prostitution; and their ancillaries: the white slave trade, fetish clubs, porn movies, money laundering and other adventures and opportunities derived from the "privatisation" or "theft" of former state owned assets in the former self-governing province of Czechoslovakia.

By 1999 and now free from subsidising Slovak notions of self-determination and democracy, the Czechs of the former Czechoslovakia re-established themselves as a constitutional monarchy in the final installment: "The End of Freddy". In a flourish of Biblical proportions, The Royal Czech Navy assists Slovak separatists in a northern Arctic archipelago in return for a promise of the crude oil seeping up from the coastal tundra - killing Russian-speaking mercenaries along the way. Led by the reformed pornographer, Freddy, the absurd became real and the real absurd. 

Published in English in the late noughties by the marvellous Garnett Press, The Rivers of Babylon received rapturous reviews in the TLS, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph written by Britain's leading literary critics and authors. Those reviews made comparisons with the comic writing by Rabelais, Balzac and Gogol (Tim Beasley-Murray in the TLS); "less Dostoyevsky and more Tom Sharpe" (Tibor Fischer in the Telegraph). 

However, Pišťanek and Rácz were not praised enough. The Rivers of Babylon trilogy is a striking piece of alternative social history pretending to be satire. Absurdists from a different era: Havel and Ionescu are shown to be polite and dated petit bourgeois parlour pseuds. Pišťanek is raw and compelling and still fresh where the absurd is real and the real absurd.

Something that could be described as Ruritanian Gothic...

Villon meets Marx and dances on Stalin's grave in "GraveLarks" by Jan Křesadlo

In the borderlands of Ruritania and western Europe lies a fertile land particularly rich in "natural" and "intellectual" resources. Bohemia also occupies a special place in literary fiction and opera that arguably began before "La Boheme" however, it is with that opera that a wider notion of "Bohemian" became a global trope around the same time as the more universal "Ruritanian".

Jan Křesadlo's first novel, published by Jantar in 2015, offers a new memorable Bohemian character, Zderad. A magnificent satirical conceit,  transposing the life of the fifteenth-century bohemian troubador French poet, François Villon, into the singer, poet and Bohemian-with-a-capital B, Zderad. Fifteenth-century Villon is re-imagined here as a talented social misfit, exploring the rather Ruritanian notion of escape from oppression, through emigration within. 

Zderad, a noble misfit, investigates a powerful party figure in 1950s Czechoslovakia. His struggle against blackmail, starvation and betrayal leaves him determined to succeed where others have failed and died.

I must also point out the scale of the challenge to render this novel into English. The original – with its Czech language antics, often playfully idiosyncratic changes of ‘register’, interspersed with the Roma language and its pidgin Slovak and Hungarian cameos, Sudeten German, French and Russian, as well as segments in Latin and, most saliently, in classical Greek – is just not an easy novel to translate. Full congratulations are deserved for Václav Pinkava even to attempt it, yet here, he simply bosses the English narrative.

Josef Škvorecký would often identify Křesadlo, and not the better known Milan Kundera, as 68 Publishers’ greatest writer, even calling him “entirely unique”. However, Škvorecký is not Křesadlo’s only high profile admirer.

Peter Pišťanek (1965-2015), the award-winning Slovak author of the Rivers of Babylon trilogy, often spoke of his admiration. In his lifetime, he published a number of articles about Křesadlo, collected here in the Afterword. In his allegorical piece, Pišťanek boldly places Křesadlo on a pedestal as “the greatest post-war Czech writer”.

      Pišťanek also alludes to Křesadlo’s favourite armchair crusade: Milan Kundera. Křesadlo despised the former Stalinist author and later professional dissident, regarding him as a morally challenged pseud. He would use pejorative allusions to Kundera for the names of his anti-heroes in his later novels.

A triumphant intellectual thriller navigating the fragile ambiguity between sado-masochism, black humour, political satire and hope.

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