Olga Wallo's largely autobiographical account in Tightrope! A Bohemian Tale (2010, Proverse Hong Kong, 257 pages, HK$180) is an unusual book about an unusual time and place. If the Berlin Wall had stayed and the Soviet Union still “ruled” Eastern Europe, the book wouldn't have appeared.
For most readers, the setting in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia circa the 1950s provides the main attraction. A curious, intellectually hungry child (essentially the author) describes what she sees and hears at home, in school and everywhere. Although billed as a novel, it's really a chronological collection of youthful memories and comments. Along the way, the narrator, always watching and listening, often tucked into a foot-rest under her dad's bookshelves, matures from a toddler into a teenager.
For leading characters, the narrator leans heavily on her father, a film-maker who must strive to satisfy the Communist state, and her mother, a neurotic actress no longer keen on acting. Of course, the narrator overhears details about stagecraft. “I daresay acting dead isn't fun; you have to lie and hold your breath, and you have to die skillfully so that you can stay in the position for a long time and not get cramps.” Symbolically, many Czechs may have “acted dead” to avoid unwanted attention.
Under Communist rule, ironies never end. “Thanks to my father, my mother can now finally get clothes tailor-made in the best salons. Only – another catch! – good salons don't exist anymore; time has erased them.”
Lesser roles go to a kindly grandmother, a quirky uncle, solemn teachers (past concentration-camp inmates), impressionable schoolmates and others. The people and events parallel Wallo's youth. So the book-cover shows the author (as a child) and her mother holding hands on a rural lane.
Defying Communist rules can bring serious consequences, which the young narrator and her family recognize. All Czechs tiptoe along a perilous tightrope. Among those who fall off, the narrator's mouthy uncle lands in a mental asylum. “He had been put in Ward Six with the raving mad; he was emaciated, tearful, and covered with wounds.”
The little girl notices the unfair, contradictory, even ludicrous, nature of what she's taught and told. “And it is during playtime that we go to the loo and all of us go together! Collectively, you understand! And whoever locks the door will be given a reprimand! I see you! I'll get the bourgeois manners out of you! We're new, healthy people; we all have to answer the call of nature, and there's nothing to hide!”
On bigger issues: “...now diplomacy is at an end because there exists a state where there are no intricacies and no lies. In the Soviet Union everyone openly says what they want and soon everywhere it will be fair.”
When the narrator starts school, her mother warns: “They will tell you a lot of crap there, but you mustn't take them seriously.”
What happens when the child reads the very words from which communism grew? “Marx and Engels perhaps, the bearded founding fathers?... This is horrible: the lines make no sense, they are rubbish. If I can see this, does everyone know? And why does no-one ever speak of it?”
The narrator's farm-rooted family loses property as the state establishes collective ownership. As usual, survival requires silence. Eventually, the girl learns, “Humiliation is like a big and ugly slug. You have to chew it and then swallow.”
People have big reasons to complain, but must do so discretely, quietly and only to trusted confidants. “These were her classmates in former times. We sit endlessly on their porches and they talk and talk, drooling with words amidst the hen mess and skinny cats. The talk swerves with injustices and monotonous laments... dispossessions... forced collective farming, and then the talk about co-ops!”
The narrator spots stark contrasts. For example, when her mother discusses William Shakespeare, a literary giant, the child focuses on her home's tattered grey linoleum.
Originally the second volume in a Czech-language trilogy, this book had diligent translation (mainly by Johanna Pokorny and Veronika Revicka) and careful editing (by Gillian Bickley). In 2008, Bickley listened when Wallo spoke at an International Writers' Workshop at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
“I was required to read some passages from my works in English,” the author recalls. “It seemed to me a task so absurdly impossible as to be entirely entertaining. However, to my exceeding surprise it was highly entertaining for my listeners....”
Bickley remembers too: that “reading of a small translated extract... was of exceptional interest. The description of a communist classroom, where children were rebuked for not drawing clinics and hospitals as an illustration of ‘The Cup of Plenty of Communism’, was amusing, striking.... I personally felt instantly that the English-reading public would find this subject matter fascinating.... How often can we read the school-life experiences under a version of communism of a person who actually experienced them?”
Wallo, from near Prague, worked 35 years at Czech TV. She published her first book in 1998, nine years after Europe's Communist Bloc collapsed. Her work includes novels, non-fiction accounts, short stories, essays and poems.
More informative and interesting than strictly “entertaining”, Tightrope! isn't every reader's “cup of tea”. But for those with a taste for its subject and setting, it may be a choice brew.
Approval rating: 62 per cent.
For more information: www.proversepublishing.com
(February 22, 2011)
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